Kalyan Singh Tomar’s two sons aged 10 and 6 go to a private school in Dimani town about 3-4 km from their Kachnodha village. While he is okay working hard to pay the annual fee of more than ₹30,000 for each of his children, what aches him is that there is a government school right in front of his house and three generations of his family donated pieces of land for the school’s construction and its expansion.
Dimani is an Assembly constituency in the Morena district of Madhya Pradesh’s politically significant Gwalior-Chambal region that sends 34 legislators to the State’s 230 MLA-strong Assembly. In the 2018 Assembly polls, the Congress had won 26 seats while the BJP could only manage seven, down from its tally of 20 in 2013 polls.
The Congress’s gains in the region went in vain in March 2020 when 22 MLAs from across the State resigned from the party following Jyotiraditya Scindia, now a Union Minister, and joined the BJP. At least 16 of them were from the Gwalior-Chambal region.
