Mumbai: Continuing its push for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project, the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government has ordered the diversion of 129.71 hectares of forest land across three districts in Maharashtra for the construction of the high-speed railway corridor.
The state revenue and forest department issued a government resolution to this effect Thursday. According to the details given in the resolution, a copy of which was seen by ThePrint, the forest land is spread across Thane, Dahanu in the Palghar district, and in the Mumbai suburban district. About 0.1 hectares of the affected forest area is in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, while 8.39 hectares are covered by mangroves.
The 508-km Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project, which is being built by the National High-Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL), will connect the two cities in just three hours at a speed of 320 km per hour.
According to an NHSRCL official, who did not wish to be named, all civil contracts for the corridor, including the three contracts for the 156 km of Maharashtra section, have been awarded.
“The said notification regarding the approval of 129.71 hectares of the forest land will speed up the civil work for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail Corridor in the Maharashtra portion,” the official added.
The Rs 1.1 lakh crore project, which is being built with financing from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), will have a total of 12 stations, of which eight will be in Gujarat and four in Maharashtra.
While the work has progressed rapidly in Gujarat, the project was off to a sluggish start in Maharashtra. The pace of land acquisition was slower in Maharashtra as there was stiff resistance from landowners and a lack of political will, with the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) strongly opposing the project.
Approvals for the project as well as land acquisition gathered pace after the Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) fell and the Eknath Shinde-led government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena came to power in June last year. The MVA comprises the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress.
ThePrint reached additional chief secretary Rajesh Kumar, who handles the state forest department, for comments on the project but did not receive any response to the call and text message.
Process on since 2019
According to the government resolution, of the 129.71 hectare forest land required for the bullet train project in Maharashtra, 49.5 hectares is in the Thane district, 71.6 hectares in Dahanu in the Palghar district, while the remaining is under mangroves and in Sanjay Gandhi National Park in the Mumbai suburban district.
The process of diverting forest land for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project has been underway since February 2019, when the additional principal chief conservator of forests in Maharashtra put it up before the then Devendra Fadnavis-led state government, the resolution said.
The same month the state government submitted the proposal to the Union Ministry of Environment Forest and Climate Change for approval, it added. According to the resolution, the ministry granted an in-principle approval in April 2019, putting forth certain conditions to comply before a final approval was granted.
The Fadnavis-led BJP government in Maharashtra fell after the 2019 assembly elections and the Thackeray-led MVA government came to power in November 2019. With that, the process of approvals for the bullet train project in Maharashtra came to a standstill till the Shinde-Fadnavis government came to power on 30 June last year.
One of the first decisions of this government was to clear pending files for approvals for the bullet train project, including writing a letter to the Union environment ministry about the compliance with the conditions it had set for the diversion of forest land for the bullet train in July 2022.
The very next month, the ministry granted a final approval to divert the required forest land for the project.
According to the data shared by the NHSRCL with ThePrint, overall 99.45 percent of the land required for the bullet train project has already been acquired.
While land acquisition in the Union Territory of Dadra Nagar Haveli is 100 percent complete, the process in Gujarat and Maharashtra stands at 99.3 percent and 99.79 percent, respectively. About a year ago, this figure was about 70 percent for Maharashtra, the NHSRCL data revealed.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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