Maval taluka villagers are yet to get compensation after giving up lands for various projects.
It was the sword of inadequate compensation in the past that forced thousands of farmers to hit the Mumbai-Pune expressway on Tuesday to oppose the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation’s (PCMC) ambitious Rs500-crore closed water pipeline project.
These villagers of Maval taluka had to give away large tracts of land to the state government in 1972 for the Pavana dam project. Farmers allege that adequate compensation was not paid to them then.
It was this fear of being “cheated” that led many — including the families of Kantabai Ankush Thakar (45) of Yelse village, Moreshwar Sopan Sathe (40) of Shivane and Shayamrao Wagu Tupe (29) of Shivane-Sadawali, the three killed in police firing on Tuesday — to respond to the bandh called by the the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shiv Sena (SS) and the Republican Party of India (RPI).
The Tupe family had to surrender 10 acres to the Pavana dam project, leave their village in Tikone and settle in Sadawali. Ramdas Tupe, the brother of the deceased, said the government has not paid them any compensation.
“We have only 1.5 acres to cultivate and feed ourselves. The proposed pipeline would take away substantial portion of this land too and deprive us of water. We were left with no option but to join the protest,” he said.
Tupe said the proposed pipeline would pass through 16 villages and more than 1,000 project affected persons (PAP) will suffer. “Most of them are worried about history repeating itself,” he said.
Kalu Raut of Rautwadi said that the proposed pipeline is passing through 27 gunthas of land in his village. “We gave 1.5 acres to the Pavana dam project and have not got a single penny in return,” he said.
Raut had received a bullet wound on his right arm and is undergoing treatment at the Dr Bhausaheb Sardesai Talegaon rural hospital.
Former BJP MLA from Maval, Rooplekha Dhore, said the villagers have been plagued by successive waves of land acquisition. They had to give up their land for Mumbai-Pune expressway and various industrial hub projects in Urse and Talegaon in the past.
“The compensation given by the government is often too paltry. In the case of the closed pipeline project, the villagers are set to lose their only source of water. That is why the protest was so spontaneous,” she said.
Thirty-five years ago, the state government had promised to allocate 1 acre of land to each of the 860 farmers who were displaced because of land acquisition for Pavana dam. All that was required for the government was to identity 860 acres of land in the adjoining villages to rehabilitate the farmers who had surrendered their agricultural land for
the dam.
The government claims that in the early 1970s, when the process of land acquisition was underway, there was no comprehensive policy making it mandatory to suitably rehabilitate displaced farmers. A senior cabinet minister said, “In this case, we have to forgo the rules to allocate 860 acres. When the project was
underway, there was no rehabilitation act in existence.”
Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan and revenue minister Balasaheb Thorat are now going to convene a meeting to discuss how to fulfill a promise made three decades ago.
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