From Our Special Correspondent
Daijiworld Media Network - Bangalore

Bangalore, Feb 19: Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa, who prides on introducing the scheme for distributing bicycles to poor girl students in the eighth standard to help them travel to school, had to ride a bicycle at BJP's national executive meet at Indore in Madhya Pradesh.

Though the dignitaries and party stalwarts attending the BJP national executive meet are housed in specially erected tents to make a show of austerity. However, the tents have been air-conditioned with special toilets and other facilities. The total expenditure, according to media reports, runs into several crores of rupees. However, newspaper accounts suggest that the arrangements were far from satisfactory with delegates facing a tough time to tend to their morning ablutions.

The chief minister, who had left for Indore to participate in the BJP national executive meet under the new national president Nitin Gadkari, has been accompanied several other ministers from the state as well as the newly installed state BJP president K S Eshwarappa, who gave up his ministerial berth to succeed the outgoing state BJP president D V Sadananda Gowda.

It may be recalled that Yeddyurappa, who originally hailed from Mandya district, had shifted base to Shimoga at the instance of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He is known to have travelled as an ordinary party worker by using the poor man's vehicle and had even carried out a bicycle chalo rally in his long career in the state party unit spanning over three decades.

Yeddyurappa's free bicycle scheme, originally meant only for poor girl students of below poverty line families in rural areas studying in eighth standard, was later extended to all girl students in rural areas studying government or aided schools. Subsequently, it was extended even to boys so as to remove heartburn among the rural high school boys.

Yeddyurappa, who started his stint as a cabinet minister by being the deputy chief minister cum finance minister in the JD(S)-BJP coalition ministry headed by H D Kumaraswamy in 2006, had continued the scheme till date. It had become quite popular to such an extent that even during the President's rule, when the state's budget proposals had to be presented in parliament, the budgetary allocations for the scheme had been continued.