Rural Gujarat will be the focus of this year’s state budget, chief minister Vijay Rupani says. Speaking for the first time after the Gujarat elections when BJP managed to win despite Congress putting up its best show in 20 years with 77 seats, Rupani said BJP has already started its preparations for 2019 general elections.In an interview to, the Gujarat CM says helping farmers overcome a possible water crisis because of low water in the Narmada Dam due to deficient rainfall in Madhya Pradesh will be the top priority of his government. Excerpts:If you look at assembly elections in states, each one of them, barring one or two, has given a mandate against the incumbent. Be in J&K or Punjab, or even UP, Assam, Haryana or Maharashtra. Gujarat is the only state that defied this. We formed the government for the sixth time. Our vote share has increased, too. It is 49.4%, meaning every second person has voted for BJP.There is no doubt that we worked for the poor and the middle class, for the farmers, particularly. This year, too, the government procured Rs 3,500-cr worth groundnut at MSP (minimum support price) to help the farmers of Saurashtra. Still, the results have been weak in the rural areas of the region. That is because of the stress employed by some people on social engineering and the resulting caste conflicts. We are fixing the social damage caused to the Gujarati society by these factors.If Hardik Patel was indeed a factor, then Surat would have been a wash out for us, but we won all seats, including four Patidar dominated ones. Same is the case with Mehsana.Be in Ahmedabad or Rajkot, I can tell you very confidently, the Patidars have voted for us. As with Mevani, Congress gave him its ‘A’ grade seat with 75,000 Muslim and 40,000 Dalit votes. It has been with Congress for several years. Their MLA was shifted to Idar from where he lost.See, Vadgam was always a Congress seat. We retained the three seats we had but we couldn’t get the extra seats we were working for. Some people played one caste against the other and this played a big role in this election.One has to understand what a big thing it is to have a 49% vote share in Gujarat. Every election has different issues; 2019 election in Gujarat will be different than 2017 election in the state. There is no doubt that people’s faith in Modi as their PM stands strong even today, and I am sure it will reflect in the way Gujarat votes for him in the coming Lok Sabha too. All 26 seats in the state will go to him.We have been promoting Hindu as a way of life. We want people to respect the foundation of the country that the Hindu religion espouses and make it a practice in their everyday life. So we should only be happy to see Congress on this track. But if they are so proud of their faith what stopped Paresh Dhanani from taking oath in the name of god in Gujarat assembly? One must not play with people’s emotions. On one hand you coax people to do puja and on the other you proudly say you won’t invoke God in assembly. That shows faith and religion for them is just for votes.(Smiles) They can do whatever they want, but people are only thinking they are not able to let go of their unfulfilled dream to be in power in the state and hence, they want to do things like this. It is a way of keeping themselves happy that we couldn’t be a real minister, so we will pretend to be that, handle portfolios that don’t exit.Our state is the first to bring out an Act of this sort. It is a strong step against the commercialisation of private education. Schools don’t even give reasons for increasing fees. We wanted transparency, reasonability and accountability. We looked at 15,000 primary, 25,000 secondary and 27,000 higher secondary schools and slabs were created. Nearly 15,600 schools were taking fees more than the slabs, and over 37 lakh students were affected by this. The fee regulatory committee constituted by us, consisting an educationist and a CA among others, looked into making the schools answer these questions. It was in four regions of the state. After high court, even Supreme Court has ruled in our favour... It is hypocritical of Congress to have raised this issue during the elections when their own Kapil Sibal was fighting on the behalf of the schools.There is no doubt that Nitin Patel was upset for a day. Nitin bhai is a senior colleague and we both are leading the government. Even Solanki came just once to talk to me. After that he came for some other work to meet some officer, after which he attended the assembly too which went on for four hours. The stories that are coming after that have no truth in them. The Gujarat cabinet is functioning as all issues regarding ministers and portfolios have been sorted out.In 20 years, this is the first time water in Narmada has gone so low. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat share the water of Narmada and how much water the states will get is decided by Narmada Control Authority. They have decided a 50% cut of water supply to all four states because MP has had less rainfall. Even MP, which used to get 18 million acre feet of water every year, will only get half of it. Gujarat was to get 9 million acre feet, which too has been reduced to 4.71. Other two states will face similar cuts. We used to get 80% to irrigation, 18% for drinking water purposes and only 2% to industry. Till March 15, the supply to farmers will continue. We gave full water for two seasons, but there is no provision of water supply during summer. Drinking water is our first priority.