Will new sop story work with voters? Opinions are split

Mumbai: After the Mahayuti alliance's setback in the Lok Sabha polls, Maharashtra has seen an unprecedented flow of sops and freebies, despite the state's spiralling debt and repeated warnings from the finance department that the state was in a precarious financial condition.
The pre-poll budget alone saw the announcement of schemes worth Rs 96,000 crore, including the Mukhya Mantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana which the govt sees as a game-changer.The apprenticeship scheme for youth, free power to agricultural pumps with 7.5 hp capacity, a scholarship scheme for EWS girls and three free gas cylinders for 52 lakh households were its other key budget schemes.
Since then, every cabinet meeting has seen handouts, including largesse to politically significant cooperative spinning mills and sugar factories. In order to balance caste equations, the state has announced corporations for a host of communities: tailors, fisherfolk, goldsmiths, Brahmins, Rajputs and the Teli and Lonari communities.
The big question is whether the sop shower will return the Mahayuti govt to office just six months after it was reduced to claiming only 17 of the state's 48 Lok Sabha seats.
Opinions are divided on this. While some feel schemes like the Ladki Bahin Yojana will draw women towards the ruling coalition, others point to the fact that K Chandrashekhar Rao's Bharat Rashtra Samithi lost power in Telangana despite offering an array of sops.
"The Ladki Bahin Yojana seems to be drawing women voters towards the Mahayuti. But it's difficult to predict the impact of sops on voters," said senior journalist Abhay Deshpande. "While the Ladli Behna Yojana helped the BJP return to power in Madhya Pradesh, it did not help KCR's party to come back to power in Telangana," he said.
However, others feel the sops could swing voters and make a key difference in the assembly polls where the margin of victory is smaller than in the Lok Sabha polls. "The Mahayuti was trailing but the sops have brought it in closer competition with the MVA alliance," said an NCP leader.
"If there is a close contest in a constituency and the margin is 10-15,000 votes, the sops will play a significant role. This will also hold true if there is a close contest of 25-30 seats between MVA and Mahayuti alliance," he added.
Leaders from the opposition MVA also rushed to register their voters for the govt's pre-poll schemes, especially the Ladki Bahin Yojana. "Why should our voters lose out on the schemes? In fact, sometimes they feel their MLA should get their vote since he helped them access the scheme," said a Congress MLA. Opposition leaders feel largesse shown by the govt towards its own leaders could negate the impact of the sops. "The only thing people will remember is that land was allotted near Nagpur to a trust controlled by state BJP chief Chandrashekhar Bawankule. The public cannot be fooled by schemes announced just ahead of polls," said a leader from the NCP (Sharad Pawar) group.
Some also feel that cash distributed during polls will far outweigh the sops. "Sometimes as much as Rs 5,000 is distributed per head. That means Rs 25,000 per family. This will be higher than the stipend distributed in the Ladki Bahin scheme so far," said a Congress leader on condition of anonymity.