The poorest MLA in India’s richest state

He hadn’t so much as a bank account against his name when he realised he was contesting Maharashtra’s assembly elections. His wife lent him Rs. 15,000. She worked as a teacher at an Adivasi residential school. His party workers contributed whatever they could, and he managed to put together a sum of Rs. 52,000 before filling up the election form.

The odds couldn’t have been stacked worse against Vinod Nikole. His primary challenger was Dhanare Paskal Janya, a sitting MLA (member of the legislative assembly), who had won from the constituency of Dahanu in 2014 with a margin of over 16,000 votes. He also belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party, which officially admitted to spending over Rs. 82 crore in the assembly elections that year.

But the lack of resources didn’t quite matter when the results came in. Nikole had become the MLA with a reasonable margin of just under 5,000 votes.

“My cousin brother later loaned me 70,000 rupees or so." That miniscule corpus "was the only cash I had ahead of the elections,” he says with a wry smile, sitting on a plastic chair outside his office in Dahanu town, which falls in the tribal dominated district of Palghar.

It seems like a story from an India that doesn’t exist anymore. But it happened as recently as 2019. And again in 2024. At a time when the BJP was streamrolling the opposition in election after election, and politics seems like a game that can’t be won without the vulgar use of money, Nikole, 48, belonging to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), is comfortably into his second term. That - in a state where 93 per cent of the legislators are crorepatis. Maharashtra ranks as the richest state by gross state domestic product (GSDP).

Born to a set of brick kiln workers in the village of Waki – four kilometres from Dahanu town – Nikole is the poorest MLA in Maharashtra, a state widely acknowledged as having the highest election spending in the country. Nikole can’t distribute money ahead of polling, nor can he hire a large social media team to push his agenda. His capital comes from being on the ground, participating in grassroots movements and being accessible to ordinary people, mainly tribal farmers and labourers.

This January, within a span of 10 days, the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), affiliated with the CPI(M), organized two massive protest marches of Adivasi farmers in the tribal belt of Palghar, Nashik and Ahilyanagar (formerly Ahmednagar). On January 19, 2026, 50,000 farmers marched towards the Palghar district collector’s office, demanding better implementation of land rights and employment, among other things.

A week or so later, thousands of farmers from Nashik marched towards Mumbai in an attempt to put the state government under pressure.

In 2006, the Indian government passed the landmark Forest Rights Act (FRA), which vests forest land and resource rights in Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have resided in such areas for generations. Gram sabhas initiate claims, verified through sub-divisional and district committees, protecting dwellers from eviction until their rights are settled.

However, the enforcement of the law remains suspect on the ground. One of the most important things the two farmers’ rallies got the state government to agree to, the AIKS confirmed in a statement, was the reopening of many rejected claims under the FRA.

Nikole, himself a Warli Adivasi, was among those at the forefront of both rallies. He walked with farmers, slept on the floor alongside everyone else, and ate food made for all. “One of his strengths is that he sees himself as part of a collective leadership and united movement,” says AIKS president Ashok Dhawale.

Ishwati Gahala, who estimates her age to be over 60 years, was part of one of the protest marches. She says it is extremely reassuring to see an MLA participate in the rally like common people. “You don’t see that nowadays,” she says. “It makes you feel that your voice is properly represented and heard.”

Ishwati, from Jamshet village in Palghar district, is a Warli Adivasi too. Her family owns two acres of farmland in the village where, much like most others, they cultivate rice during the monsoon season. “We only take out one crop,” she tells me. “Without irrigation, we can’t do much for the rest of the season.”

“This region is dominated by Adivasis, so the two most important issues here are worker rights and land rights,” Nikole says. “We have unions in 50-60 companies here, and we regularly negotiate with them for better wages while making sure the companies don’t have to incur a loss.”

The day I met Nikole in Dahanu, he had just arrived from the town of Boisar – about an hour away – after addressing a meeting of contract labourers. “We managed to increase their salaries from 12,000 to 13,050 rupees a month,” he says.

There is also a thermal power plant of the Adani group here. It was earlier handled by Anil Ambani. Nikole says his party has a union in the power plant as well, where they have regularly pushed for increments for contract workers. “Unions become ineffective when leaders sell out,” he adds. “That will never happen to us.”

Suresh Jadhav, 54, a contract worker at the thermal plant, says his salary was Rs. 2,600 in 2010 when they first unionised. Nikole wasn’t an MLA back then but oversaw the union. He remains an office bearer there even after becoming a lawmaker, but has bigger responsibilities now.

“We were nearly 1,000 of us working at the thermal plant in 2010,” Jadhav says. “Today, we make 28,000 rupees a month.”

That is an almost 1,000 percent rise in salary in a span of 16 years – something quite unimaginable for the workers back in the day.

Jadhav, who is responsible for checking the environmental footprint of the plant, says their voices automatically carry more weight because the MLA is on their side. “It was easier to ignore us before 2019,” Jadhav says. “Our demands are taken more seriously now.”

Common people queue up to meet Nikole and share their problems. He addresses their concerns and makes calls to his contacts in order to follow up on their issues. “That is the only way I can win elections,” he says. “Every morning after 10 a.m. you can find me here outside my office. Anyone can walk in and talk to me.”

In 2024, when Nikole submitted his election affidavit for his second run, his declared assets were worth Rs. 87 lakh – most of it comes from the 0.25 acre of land he recently purchased and the modest house he built over it.

When he became an MLA in 2019, he started receiving a salary of Rs. 1.5 lakh per month which, in Maharashtra, became Rs. 2 lakh after the 2024 elections. At 41, he was getting a proper monthly income for the first time in his life. He saved up from that amount to build a house for his family and himself.

“Before that, the party paid me Rs. 3,000 a month,” Nikole says. “I donate half my monthly salary to the party even today.”

In contrast, when the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) analysed the outgoing Maharashtra assembly of 2024, 93 per cent of the MLAs turned out to be crorepatis. And the richest MLA declared assets worth Rs. 500 crore. The ADR did another analytical report after the conclusion of the 2024 assembly elections, which the BJP swept, and found that 157 (56 per cent) out of 279 crorepati winners analysed, won with a vote share of 50 per cent and above.

Opposition parties have credibly pointed out how the BJP starts every election with a clear advantage because of the huge gap in resources between them and the ruling party. In the financial year 2024-25 alone, the BJP drew donations of over Rs. 6,000 crore nationally – 12 times more than the largest opposition party, the Congress. A level playing field does not exist.

Even in the civic polls of Maharashtra, Rs. 55 crore was spent on online advertisements alone in less than a month. And countless crores of rupees were distributed to voters ahead of the polls.

But even this massive disadvantage, Nikole says, can be mitigated if you “make a home in the hearts and minds of voters. You have to earn their trust,” he adds. “So, then the voters won’t sell their vote when others try to throw money at them. The amount of money my BJP opponent spent was probably 100 times more than what I did.”

After the 2019 assembly elections, no party had a clear majority to form government. The Shiv Sena moved their 56 MLAs to a resort overnight in order to stop the BJP from poaching their people. At a time when the rest of the opposition MLAs were huddled in resorts, Nikole was openly roaming around Dahanu.

“The unseasonal rainfall had caused a serious loss to farmers in our region,” he says. “I inspected it and went about my business. My party or my voters didn’t have to worry about me defecting.”

Nikole used to work in a canteen in Dahanu serving food and cleaning utensils after he dropped out of college due to financial difficulties.

A senior CPI(M) leader spotted him and convinced him to join the party. “The membership fee was 5 rupees at the time,” he recalls. Nikole remembers sarcastically asking the senior leader: “You had breakfast at my canteen, and I am supposed to give you five rupees? Shouldn’t it be the other way round?”

After he cut the receipt for Rs. 5, the leader replied, “You are now a member of the party.”

“I didn’t understand what it meant at the time,” Nikole says. “But he took me under his wing, and I started working for the party.”

Long before Nikole contested the elections from Dahanu, he was at the forefront of several grassroots movements, along with his colleagues, taking on powerful people.

Between 2013 and 2015, the police slapped cases of unlawful assembly and rioting on Nikole for his activism. He was even served an externment order banning him from entering five districts. But a gathering of 25,000 farmers outside the Dahanu police station forced cancellation of that order. “Even after becoming an MLA, I haven’t disappeared from the ground,” he says. “In fact, I have become more active. Moving forward, I want to make sure we bring a first class hospital in my constituency. That is still missing.”