The DFCC on its part has reduced the land acquisition area from 39 hectares to a little over 32 hectares by bringing about minor changes to the construction work. The new plan entails that instead of CIDCO acquiring all the land and handing it over to the DFCC, the DFCC itself will acquire a major part of the land under various mechanisms.
In a major breakthrough right before Friday's assessment of Maharashtra-based projects in Mumbai by the Central Project Monitoring Group controlled by the Prime Minister's Office, the state government's City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) and railway ministry's Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation (DFCC) have managed to come close to a deal on the vexed issue of land acquisition for the freight corridor project between Panvel and JNPT. The Central Project Monitoring Group will hold a meeting of state projects under the PM's Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation (Pragati) scheme in Mumbai on Friday, with the state being represented by the chief secretary.
According to sources, the new CIDCO-DFCC plan has a high chance of being accepted as the DFCC is expected to get land at rates much lower than the Rs84 crore per hectare that CIDCO had initially demanded, as highlighted by dna in its November 6, 2015 edition. The earlier demand was costing the DFCC upwards of Rs3,200 crores for about 39 hectares, whereas the new plan would bring down the cost of land acquisition by almost half, said sources.
The DFCC on its part has reduced the land acquisition area from 39 hectares to a little over 32 hectares by bringing about minor changes to the construction work. The new plan entails that instead of CIDCO acquiring all the land and handing it over to the DFCC, the DFCC itself will acquire a major part of the land under various mechanisms.
Under the plan, CIDCO has 14.4 hectares of vacant land which will be given to the DFCC at around Rs 42 crores per hectare, which comes to around Rs600 crore. Another seven hectares of land belonging to the revenue department of the state government will be acquired from the state directly by the DFCC under rates set down by the collector, said sources. The third lot of almost 10 hectares is CIDCO land that has third party interest, with private entities using the land under various agreements with CIDCO. It will now be acquired by the DFCC under the Railways (Amendment) Act, 2008.
The process of land acquisition might take some time but the rates would be such, said officials, that it does not derail the project while, at the same time, people get the kind of compensation that is mandated by the Railways under the 2008 Act. The project, apart from being a game-changer for the railways, is also a favourite of prime minister Narendra Modi and the deadline for the completion of the Rs81,500-crore project is the end of 2019.
The land game:
Total land required for DFC — 10548 hectares or 105.48 sq km
Total land acquired — over 85 per cent
Land acquisition held up on DFC — 440 patches across 358 km
Arbitration cases on land acquisition — 6,300 (out of which 3,125 have been finalised)
Court cases on land acquisition — 1,445 (432 finalised)
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