Odisha Is My ‘Karmabhoomi’, Tweets Ashwini Vaishnaw On Reaching Bhubaneswar; Know His Itinerary

Bhubaneswar: Union Ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw and Dharmendra Pradhan arrived in the Odisha capital on Thursday morning.

According to sources, they will head to Jagannath Temple in Puri from Biju Patnaik International Airport here.

The Union ministers will attend a press briefing in the evening and take part in ‘Jan Aashirwad Yatra’ from Friday.

Vaishnaw kept updating about his visit to Odisha – from boarding the flight in New Delhi to arriving in Bhubaneswar – on his official Twitter handle. And all the tweets are in Odia.

This, along with his taking oath in Odia at the Upper House in 2019 and invoking Jagannath after being sworn in as a Cabinet minister, is being viewed as a bid to show his commitment to Odisha of which he is not a native.

A 1994-batch Odisha cadre IAS officer, the former bureaucrat-turned-politician belongs to Rajashthan.

Speaking to the media earlier, BJP State general secretary Golak Mohapatra had said that Vaishnav will travel to Rayagada in Hirakhand Express in the evening and visit Koraput the followed day. The Union Minister is scheduled to visit Jeypore and Nabarangpur on August 21 and reach Bhawanipatna on August 22.

Vaishnav will again board a train from Balangir and arrive in Bhubaneswar on August 22.

Dharmendra will hold programmes in Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Khurda from August 19 to 22, he added.

According to party sources, the Union Ministers will travel 419 km and hold programmes at 115 places in six Parliamentary constituencies in seven districts.

The main objective of the programme is to take the various schemes of PM Modi government to the people, said Mohapatra.