Mumbai: Plans for Pune’s much-delayed Purandar airport are gaining momentum once again, with the state government’s industries department having issued a notification for the project and the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) having initiated a drone survey for the area.
Last month, the state industries department issued two government resolutions and a notification, seen by ThePrint, for land acquisition with regard to the Purandar project.
In the resolutions, the state government specified that it would need to acquire a total of 2,673.98 hectares of private land and 79.07 hectares of government land for the project across six villages in the Purandar taluka of the Pune district. These are Vanpuri, Kumbharvalan, Udachiwadi, Ekhatpur, Munjewadi, Khanvadi and Paragon.
The notification detailed the village-wise survey numbers and areas that will be needed to be acquired for the project.
Following the government resolutions and notifications, the MIDC has invited bids to start a topographical survey of the entire area to be acquired using drone instruments, laying down a timeline of four months for it.
According to state government directions, the airport will be jointly developed by the Maharashtra Airport Development Corporation (MADC) and the MIDC, while the land acquisition process will be handled by the latter.
There is, however, stiff resistance on the ground for land acquisition.
Mahadev Lakshman Tilekar, a farmer from the Munjewadi village and part of the Sangarsh Samiti, an agitation committee of members from all seven villages in the Purandar taluka, told ThePrint that a delegation of farmers met officials at the Pune collector office earlier this week to voice their opposition.
“Now, it is being said that a divisional MIDC official will visit the area earmarked for the project later this week. We will also have a dialogue with him and then plan how to take our movement forward,” he said.
An official with the state industries department said, “We will not acquire land by force. We will convince every affected stakeholder and get them on board.”
The tender documents for the land survey also state that “there may be changes in the area to be surveyed due to land acquisition problems.”
MIDC chief executive P. Velarasu did not respond to ThePrint’s call and text message.
The much-delayed Purandar airport
Pune currently has only 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 (NCP) government.
The government then considered multiple sites such as Talegaon Dabhade, Saswad, Rajgurunagar and Chakan. In 2015, following stiff resistance to land acquisition in this belt, especially around Chakan, the then Devendra Fadnavis-led government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the undivided Shiv Sena dropped the plan and picked a new site at Purandar.
The plan was met with massive protests by farmers from the affected villages. In 2019, when the government changed and the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government came to power, it scrapped the Fadnavis government’s plan and shifted the site to about 20 km away to another cluster of villages.
However, in 2022, when the MVA government fell and the Mahayuti government came to power under Eknath Shinde, the plan was shifted back to the site originally identified in 2015. While every major politician visiting Pune would talk about the Purandar airport, the state government held back on publishing a formal notification for the land acquisition with Lok Sabha and state polls drawing closer.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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