Maharashtra Lok Sabha Elections 2024: Polling for 11 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra will be held in the third phase on May 7. In the first two phases, voting was held for 13 seats. Among the high-profile seats that will go to polls in the third phase are NCP stronghold Baramati, Sangli, Satara, Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg, and Kolhapur. Maharashtra Lok Sabha Elections Phase 3
Baramati Raigad Osmanabad Latur (SC) Solapur (SC) Madha Sangli Satara Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg Kolhapur Hatkanangle
Baramati, the home turf of Sharad Pawar, is set for a high-profile battle, with the NCP's Sunetra Pawar, wife of Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, taking on Supriya Sule - the daughter of Sharad Pawar. Sule and Ajit Pawar are cousins and Sunetra Pawar is the sitting MP's sister-in-law. The Baramati Lok Sabha constituency in the Pune district has been a bastion of Sharad Pawar since the 1960s. Ajit Pawar has been MLA from Baramati since 1991. In 2019, he garnered 83 per cent of the vote share and defeated the BJP's Gopichand Padalkar by a whopping 1,65,000 votes.
Sangli, a Congress stronghold but allotted to the Shiv Sena (UBT) under the Opposition INDIA bloc's seat-sharing deal, is set to witness a three-way fight. Here, Uddhav Sena's Chandrahar Subhash Patil is up against BJP's Sanjaykaka Patil. However, Congress' Vishal Patil, the grandson of the late Chief Minister Vasantdada Patil, is also contesting as an Independent candidate. Vishal Patil had been eyeing a Congress ticket from Sangli.
In Satara, Udayanraje Bhosale, a descendent of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, has been fielded by the BJP to take on Shashikant Jaywantrao Shinde of Sharad Pawar-headed NCP. Bhosale recently said he would win by a margin of more than two lakh votes, and said the constituency was no longer a Congress-NCP bastion. In 2019, he lost the seat to NCP by 87,717 votes.
Ahead of the polls, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said the scarcity of drinking water in Satara, Sangli, and Solapur is getting worse with every passing day. Between March and April, he said, the requirement of tankers has increased 13% in Sangli, 31% in Satara, and 84% in Solapur. He said dams, ponds and lakes in the area are drying up worryingly fast. "The situation is the worst in Solapur, which has had 2 BJP MPs in the last 10 years. Water supply in the city's main source of water, the Ujani Dam, has dipped below zero, and the city is currently surviving on the 'dead storage' in the dam."