Lok Sabha polls: Getting migrant voters back key for Satara suitors

One challenge for the frontrunners in the Satara parliamentary constituency has been to persuade thousands of its residents, who are employed in Mumbai and other major cities of Maharashtra, to return home and vote on polling day.
 

Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) candidate Shashikant Shinde told Business Standard that while the campaign has been intense over the past month, the last four days in the run-up to the polling day have been spent in urging people to ask their respective family members to return home for the polling day.
 

The issues that frequently crop up in discussions with the local residents in this predominantly rural agrarian district are water scarcity, remunerative prices for farm produce and the promise of doubling farm incomes. There are also concerns about the Agniveer scheme, as the district has a long legacy of sending young people to the armed forces.
 

Shinde says his priorities on getting elected will be to work for setting up an industrial estate and IT park and encourage tourism. Shinde is faced with the challenge of keeping the seat with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which it has won for 25 years. Shinde is a member of the legislative council and is facing a probe over allegations of corruption in the Navi Mumbai Agriculture Produce Market Committee.
 

His principal opponent is Udyanraje Bhonsle of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a descendant of 17th century ruler Chhatarapati Shivaji, who won the seat as an NCP candidate in 2009, 2014 and 2019. In 2019, he quit NCP to join the BJP. In the subsequent bypoll held in October 2019, NCP’s Shriniwas Patil defeated Bhonsle by over 87,000 votes. The BJP later sent Bhonsle to the Rajya Sabha in 2020.