Union minister of state for non-conventional energy and sitting Congress MP from Nagpur, Vilas Muttemwar, always reminds listeners at public meetings that he was the one who pursued the state and central governments for the Multi-Nodal Cargo Hub at Nagpur (MIHAN) project, which comprises an international airport, cargo hub and a special economic zone, and ensured that the ambitious project saw the light of the day.
The SEZ project is expected to attract an investment of Rs 50,000 crore and would create 150,000 direct jobs. The international airport project is likely to attract an investment of another Rs 7,500 crore and would create 5,000 direct jobs. It is expected that the project will not only change the face of the industrially backward Vidarbha region — now notorious for a spate of farmer suicides — but also of central India.
Muttemwar’s opponent from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and former MP, Banwarilal Purohit, laments that hardly any major industry has set up shop in the SEZ and provided employment to the local youth. He also blames the ‘battle’ between Union Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel and Mutttemwar for grabbing credit for the project, which delayed the transfer of Nagpur airport to Maharashtra Airport Development Company (MADC), the nodal agency for the MIHAN project.
When Purohit picks holes in Muttemwar’s claims, he is not far from truth. According to MADC officials, out of 1,670 acres of land leased to various companies which included Satyam, HCL, Boeing, Shapoorji & Palanji, DLF, L&T Infotech and TCS, civil work is being undertaken only on 410 acres.
It took almost four and a half years for the Union government to green-signal the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to form a joint venture company with MADC to develop the international airport in Nagpur.
But the hype created around the project attracted huge investment from many Mumbai-based builders and developers and NRIs in the real estate sector in and around Nagpur, who thought MIHAN would help them to make a killing. This led realty prices in and around Nagpur to soar by five to seven times.
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Anshuman Sahastrabhojane, a Nagpur-based young builder, says: “Because of the sudden rush of builders and developers from Mumbai and other parts of the country and even NRIs, there was huge speculative investment in Nagpur’s real estate sector and now everyone is stuck with high-cost land acquisitions”.
Aniket Karde, a student of the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT), says, “Students who had got selected earlier through campus interviews from our institute got regret letters this year. However, as our institute has a good reputation, they got jobs in the country, even abroad. But if the the MIHAN project had taken off, thousands of students studying in various private engineering colleges in and around Nagpur would have found jobs locally.”
However, it is not just Muttemwar’s failure to deliver on his promises that is Purohit’s main poll plank. He also speaks about Muttemwar’s failure as a minister to utilise the funds allocated to his ministry, or to leverage his ministry for Nagpur’s overall development. The issue of MIHAN finds just a passing reference in Purohit’s speeches.
Ranvirsingh Jamwala fourth year student from VNIT is both frustrated and angry as one of the country’s large engineering company which had selected him through campus interview last year, has sent a regret letter just last month. “Had we been informed earlier, we would have started looking for other options. but now I will graduate in a month from a prestigious institute like VNIT but I will still be unemployed.” Jamwala, who is angry, has vowed to vote and make his vote count.