UPA Coordination Committee meeting on February 26

A meeting of the UPA Coordination Committee will be held on February 26 to finalise the strategy of the ruling coalition in the three-month-long Budget Session of Parliament which began yesterday.
The meeting has been convened hours after the presentation of the Railway Budget and ahead of the unveiling of the General Budget 2013-14 which is expected to be a populist affair.
With Lok Sabha polls just 15 months away, this will be the last full-fledged budget of the Congress-led coalition which is in office since May 2004.
The frequency of meetings of the coordination committees had increased sometime back when NCP protested against allies being not considered by the Congress on a regular basis. However, there have been very few such interactions since Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress walked out of the UPA last year.

Besides several issues, the issue of Telangana is expected to figure at the deliberations convened by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi, who is also the UPA chairperson.
NCP chief Sharad Pawar had suggested the need for such an early meeting to discuss Telangana.
The UPA meeting will be the first formal interaction between Congress and allies after the AgustaWestland helicopter scam broke out.
The National Conference, which is sharing power with Congress in Jammu and Kashmir and at the Centre, is upset over the way the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru was carried out. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah had said it would increase alienation of Kashmiri people.