Wooing the women voters of the Udhampur constituency for the Lok Sabha, Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh said on Monday that Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave women the “ease of living with dignity”.

Singh is the BJP candidate from the constituency.

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Addressing a series of election rallies comprising mostly of women self-help groups and women PRIs in the Ramnagar segment, Singh said a series of women-centric reforms and schemes were rolled out by Prime Minister Modi in the last 10 years with an extreme degree of sensitivity which was missing during the earlier regimes for almost six decades after independence, he said.

He recalled that Modi made history as Prime Minister in his very first Independence Day address from the Red Fort when he gave a call for the construction of toilets for women. No one had realised the seriousness of this but in the very first year nearly four lakh toilets for women were constructed and then it turned into a mass campaign to bring up a toilet in every household.

Similarly, he said, through the Ujjawala scheme over 10 crore household women were liberated from the unhealthy plight of cooking through smoky kitchens and risking their health because now they have the facility of using gas cylinders as an easy and healthy cooking option.

All these schemes, Singh said have not only brought comfort in the lives of the women of this country but have also given them self-confidence and reduced their dependence on their male counterparts.

For example, he said, under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana the “pukka house” is now constructed in the name of the female spouse or the housewife. On the other hand, under the Mudra scheme loans for a livelihood without any guarantee are provided and out of these so far over 60 per cent have been availed by females.

Special schemes to promote Science & Technology among young women have been introduced, said Singh, and these include exclusive scholarships and exclusive programmes dedicated to developing technology skills in a woman at every stage of her life whether she is an adolescent or a youth, or a young housewife or a middle-aged lady.

He said the enthusiasm and self-confidence that he witnesses among the women even in the remotest villages of his constituency is a testimony of the success of the Modi reforms.

For the Udhampur Lok Sabha constituency, he said the call should be for a victory margin of more than 4 lakh votes to beat his previous record margin of nearly 3.60 lakh.