Mumbai: In May, when a team from the Pune district collector’s office visited the Purandar taluka for a drone survey to prepare for land acquisition for a proposed international airport there, irate villagers, unwilling to part with even a single acre, pelted stones at them.
Several police personnel as well as villagers were injured in the clash and some drone equipment was also damaged.
Now, as the year draws to an end, Pune Collector Jitendra Dudi and his team have managed what seemed impossible on that fateful day. They have got the in-principle consent of more than 95 percent of the families to be displaced by the proposed Purandar airport project.
“There was stiff opposition in the beginning, but we personally convinced people by having meetings with small groups, addressing their concerns and requirements, and explaining to them the need for this project,” Dudi, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the 2016 batch, told ThePrint.
“There are a few landowners who have still held out consent, but we are confident that they will also eventually agree.”
The compensation package, however, is yet to be finalised, Dudi said.
Some of the affected landowners said that while they have softened stand towards the airport project and allowed the authorities to proceed with the land acquisition process, they will only give the final nod if the compensation package is attractive enough.
Pune currently has one airport, the Lohegaon airport, which is a defence airport and has limitations on expanding for civil traffic. To address the city’s ever-growing air traffic requirements, the Maharashtra government first came up with a plan for a second airport in 2004 under the then Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (Congress-NCP) government.
In 2015, the then Devendra Fadnavis-led government zeroed in on the Purandar location for the airport. Purandar is about 50 km from where the Pune airport is located.
However, as governments changed, so did plans, and the airport plan never took off. There was also stringent opposition to land acquisition on the ground.
In April, five months after the Fadnavis-led Mahayuti government, comprising the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP came to power, the government revived the Purandar airport project and issued an initial notification for land acquisition.
The Maharashtra Airport Development Corporation (MADC) will develop the airport jointly with the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), while the land acquisition is being handled by the latter.
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Need for second airport
With Lohegaon being a defence airport, there are several restrictions on when civil aviation flights can take off and land. On any given day, no flights land in the city for three hours in the morning from about 7.30 am onwards, and none take off too.
Other than the morning block, the Lohegaon airport has a five-hour block every Saturday when civil traffic is not permitted, from about 11 am to 4 pm.
With all these constraints, most people end up planning international travel from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai, which is about 150 km away and takes four hours to reach. With the Navi Mumbai International Airport scheduled to start operations this month, Pune residents are now looking at it as a more viable option.
The Purandar airport, located 50 km from the city, will also be far and will take between an hour to two hours to reach depending on the starting point in Pune, but authorities hope that with good infrastructure connectivity, it will give the city, Maharashtra’s premier IT and manufacturing hub, the space it needs for passenger and cargo air traffic to ramp up.
Meanwhile, the Airports Authority of India has built a new terminal at the Lohegaon airport to expand civil aviation operations. The terminal started functioning in July last year.
Air Vice Marshal Manmohan Bahadur (retired) said moving the defence airfield out of the Lohegaon airport is not a feasible option.
“The Pune airfield is one of the oldest, established in 1939, but historical importance aside, it is not practical to move the airfield out of the city. There is specific infrastructure that has been created at the Pune airfield at a very great cost, be it the storage of aircraft, weapons storage, missile systems, training and maintenance infrastructure, etc. To create this anywhere else will take many years, a situation not acceptable operationally,” he explained.
“All airfields when they were created were far from towns, but the towns have spread. So, this is a question not just about Pune, but for most airfields today, which makes moving Pune’s airfield impractical,” he added.
Turning no to yes
The former Congress-NCP government had initially planned the airport at Chakan, but the plan met with stiff opposition from landowners. The Fadnavis government, after it came to power, dropped the Chakan plan and chose Purandar instead. However, initially it seemed that even Purandar could go the Chakan way.
Kiran Hole, sarpanch of Khanvadi village in Purandar taluka, is among those who will be affected by the airport project. He will have to let go of at least two acres of his very fertile four-acre land.
As sarpanch, Hole, along with the sarpanches of other project-affected villages, had signed multiple resolutions against the proposed airport. In 2023, they even sent a memorandum to Fadnavis, when he was deputy CM and was in the taluka for a government event, Hole told ThePrint.
But, like that of most others, Hole’s opposition has dissipated.
“We have seen the collector hold meetings personally with everyone for the past five-six months. He has visited every village to be affected by the project, sat down with the people there. So, we decided to give our approval for now,” he said, adding that most people on the ground feel the same now.
“We have given our approval to the authorities to complete land and crop measurement. But we are certain that we want a good compensation package in return. If the compensation is not up to the mark, people won’t be willing to part with their lands.”
According to the MADC plan, the Purandar airport will be a greenfield international airport with a capacity of 75 million passengers per annum. It will have two parallel runways and an apron to park over 100 aircraft.
For this, the government will have to acquire 1,285 hectares across seven villages in the Purandar taluka: Munjawadi, Khanvadi, Ekhatpur, Kumbharvalan, Pargaon, Udachiwadi and Vanpuri.
Dudi said the impasse was broken largely by conversations with small groups of landowners in every village and within a few months, in every village, there were a few pockets that seemed willing to work with the government.
“They had concerns about how they would benefit. We told them that as owners of a percentage of the developed land in the vicinity of the airport, they will be the first beneficiaries of the project,” he told ThePrint.
Authorities also made emotional appeals. This, they told villagers, was a way in which they can do something that the country needs and participate in the nation-building process.
The compensation package
Villagers ThePrint spoke to said the state government provisionally offered Rs 1 crore per acre as compensation, according to the government notification issued on 17 March under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013.
They have also been promised 10 percent of the developed land as a commercial, residential or mixed-use plot, skill training support and so on. Those who have houses have been promised a residential plot in the area around the airport.
Mahadev Lakshman Tilekar, a farmer from Munjawadi village and part of the Sangarsh Samiti, an agitation committee of members from all seven villages in the Purandar taluka, is among those who have consented for crop measurement, but plans to bargain hard on the compensation.
“We decided to let them conduct land measurement because once the government decides to do something, it is anyway very difficult to stop it. But we need fair compensation for what we are giving up,” said Tilekar, who grows a sizeable produce of ruby red plump pomegranates every year.
He added that he has been scouting for alternative land to buy to continue farming in the neighbouring Baramati taluka, but the rates are very high.
“A compensation of Rs 1 crore will get me nothing. We should be able to buy a good piece of land, have a good house, then we don’t mind giving our land for the airport.”
Dudi asserted that the Maharashtra government will hear out the project-affected families and take a call on the final compensation package soon.
Meanwhile, the MIDC has started making arrangements to fund the costly land acquisition process.
“We estimate the cost of land acquisition to be about Rs 4,000 crore to Rs 5,000 crore. We are looking internally to raise money for this, and for our other activities through debt. For now, we have sent a proposal to the finance department this month to allocate us Rs 1,000 crore for the Purandar land acquisition process to begin,” an MIDC official told ThePrint.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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