Chief minister Mamata Banerjee is scheduled to reach north Bengal on Sunday on a four-day trip and hand over a slew of welfare benefits and services to people, including land rights to tea workers of the region.
The visit, which is likely to be Mamata's last official tour in the region before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, has assumed political significance as it has been planned during the ongoing Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra launched by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
Also, over the past few months, Mamata and her party leadership have been steadfastly focusing on north Bengal, a region where the BJP had bagged seven of eight parliamentary seats in 2019.
According to sources in the Alipurduar and Cooch Behar districts, Mamata will reach Hasimara Air Force Station in Alipurduar district on Sunday afternoon. She will then take a chopper and reach Cooch Behar.
On Monday, the chief minister will attend a public service distribution programme at the Raasmela Ground of Cooch Behar town. In the same afternoon, she will leave for Uttarkanya, the branch secretariat of the state located at the southern end of Siliguri.
“She will attend a patta (secure land tenure deed) distribution programme at a ground near Uttarkanya. The beneficiaries will be from Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri districts and most of them would be tea workers,” said a source.
In this region, the support of tea workers and their families decides the results of three Lok Sabha seats — Darjeeling, Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri. In the last general elections, the BJP bagged all the tea belt seats.
“There is a clear instruction from the chief minister to expedite the process of handing over land rights to as many tea workers as possible. It was a longstanding demand of the tea population which she has met. Handing over of land rights, coupled with a series of social welfare schemes which have been extended in the tea belt, can help the party revive its support base here,” said a Trinamul MLA of the region.
On January 30, Mamata is supposed to fly to Raiganj and then to Balurghat for similar government events like in Cooch Behar, a day after Rahul Gandhi moves through a portion of North Dinajpur district and enter Bihar. Raiganj is the district headquarters of North Dinajpur. She is scheduled to reach Malda on January 31.
“It is evident that the chief minister wants to drive home the point that she is sincere in extending help to the people in the district, the home turf of late Congress leader Priya Ranjan Das Munshi. The same holds for Malda, another former bastion of the Congress where the party has steadily lost support over the years,” said a political observer.