Murder, not suicide

The farmers in Raigad are ready to fight a do-or-die battle

Bunty Das Mumbai

Call them land pirates. On the face of it they intend to develop infrastructure, provide jobs, reduce pressure on cities in lieu of tax concessions and subsidised land. But remove the veneer and the real intention is visible. The aim is to grab huge tracts of farmers’ lands, convert them into a real estate megalith, and earn eternal profits. What happens to the displaced persons is not their concern, and anybody opposing these SEZs is coolly termed anti-development. Especially in Maharashtra and Mumbai, our own utopia – Shanghai.

Consider this. For the past 20 years, farmers of Pen taluk, in Raigad district, of Maharashtra, have been fighting for water from the Hetawane dam. The Hetawane project, with 52 villages in the command area, was proposed in 1980 to irrigate 5,750 hectares and provide drinking water to Pen and Navi Mumbai. However, instead of the promised water, the Maharashtra government has decided to set up a Special Economic Zone.

The proposed zone, to be set up by Reliance Group, will be on 10,000 hectares of land, acquired from 45 villages. Aghast at the state government’s decision, the farmers are asking, “why this SEZ instead of a fertile agriculture zone?”

Predictably, the farmers are seething with anger. Unlike in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, where hundreds of farmers are committing suicide because of debt burden and cold-blooded government apathy, here they are not ready to give up. “We will commit murder, not suicide,” say the agitated farmers of Pen taluk.

Seventy-two-year-old Janardhan Mhatre, a Gandhian from Vashi, has been leading the farmers struggle, Antyodaya Chalval, seeking water from the dam for the past 20 years. Mhatre says that in over 20 villages, of these 52 villages, the government has served land-acquisition notices. But, he argues, this is unlawful because legally once the land falls in the command area of an irrigation project, it just cannot be used for any other purpose.

The most interesting part of the land acquisition process is that the notices have been issued under the Land Acquisition Act, 1994, for a ‘public project’. How can a project owned by Reliance be called a public project? Indeed, this is the scenario of only one of the 48 SEZs in Maharashtra, out of the total 220 approved by the Centre. As reports trickle in from across the rural landscape in the state, the social conflict is running deeper and stronger. And it is spreading. Because the special brazenness of it all stinks.