Moving a village

Fields, houses and hills will all have to make way for the Navi Mumbai airport. Arghya Ganguly visits the people who are resisting displacement.

With clenched fists and teeth, the villagers of Chinchpada charge towards the just-arrived white Tata Sumo filled with surveyors. It’s the second day of the first round of village survey for the Navi Mumbai international airport rehabilitation. The surveyors are here to mark all houses and count all residents. The surveyors try and explain why they are four hours late but their answers don’t wash with the Gram Bachao Association (GBA; gram bachao is Hindi for save the village) committee members. The surveyors are asked to back off if they don’t want any untoward incident to take place. On the surface these protesters are furious; beneath, they are near-murderous.

 

You gauge that it’s not the surveyors from the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers they are really peeved with; a mere delay of four hours obviously isn’t the actual reason the villagers have reached boiling point. It appears what the villagers are most angry about is that — just like the last 40 years — their life they perceive will continue to be tinkered with and interfered with by the establishment and they will have no option but to compromise with the powers that be once again.

There were heated exchanges between villagers and surveyors even on the first day of the survey. Jaiwant Pardesi, head of GBA, had insisted to the surveyors that the numbering of the houses be done differently. For all the four families, staying at his duplex set-up, he wanted separate numbers. The surveyors refused, saying that the rules of the government state that a structure standing on a single plinth will be given serial number 1 and the number of owners will be bracketed under 1 (a) and 1 (b) etc., and not 1, 2, 3 and 4. Either way, the surveyors claim that owners will get a separate house during rehabilitation, depending on the measurement of the house. Therefore, if it’s a 600 square metre house and if there are four owners, then it will be divided equally.

To avoid similar clashes on the second day, the survey team had a meeting (which was the reason behind their four-hour delay) with their chief, Jockin Arputham, who suggested to his team to comply if the villagers demanded on getting their houses numbered differently but then to mark them according to the guidelines in their own record books.

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Chinchpada is the first of the 18 affected villages which are being surveyed. It will take at least a month to complete. After writing the serial number with chalk on the wall of the house, the surveyors — in case there is no mistake in numbering previously — will go back to the same house after a week to permanently mark it with oil paint and hand over the survey form to the residents to fill. Thereafter, there will be a measurement survey and then a bio-metric survey. A member of the team says that “one has to keep calm while dealing with these villagers. If they get irritated or don’t understand some aspect of our survey, then we move into another house because we believe if we complete the next house successfully then this house will pass on the message to the house which was reluctant to be numbered for whatever reasons”.

Whoever you speak to in the villages lets out a stream of invectives. Misgivings abound against the state government’s City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (Cidco) which is responsible for developing the new airport. “We all know that the government will take the land from us. They will even bring the military to take the land away from us. The government — Cidco — has tricked us for the last 40 years. They had taken 15,000 acre. How many of those people who got displaced got jobs? They promised to give us one job per house. These people just take the land from us and put it up for auction,” says Gopi Matre, a member of the committee formed in Pargaon village to tackle issues related to the airport.

“It’s not that we don’t want to give the land but give us the money we deserve and then take it. We have had meetings with Cidco for the last four years. Nothing comes out of these meetings. Now, just for trial we have given them permission to survey one village,” he adds. “Unless they give us the estimate of our land, we are not going to let them survey other villages. We have even asked them for a rough estimate, but they don’t speak a word about money. They won’t give our children jobs, we know. They will get the workers from other states and tell us that our children are not educated enough, not talented enough.” For the record, the farmers are asking for Rs 20 crore per acre, the government, according to sources, is willing to pay Rs 3-4 crore, while the market rate is between Rs 8 crore and Rs 15 crore, depending on the state of the land.

Four years ago — much like 40-odd years ago when Navi Mumbai was constructed — Cidco officials had come around promising every house in the village a job. Matre had just turned 18 back then four decades ago “when they came around with bagful of false promises. They didn’t give me a job and neither did my friends get one”. Therefore, this time, the villagers have asked Cidco to hand over offer letters first. But Matre, like a host of others in the village, doesn’t solely blame Cidco for their state of despair. Back in the 1970s, when Cidco had acquired the land of close to 95 villages, none of the leaders of these villages questioned the motive behind acquiring thousands and thousands of hectares of land. Bulk of the land still remains unused, much to the discomfort of the families which have increased in size since then. “We are eight of us living in this small house. I have land somewhere else too where I want to make a house, but Cidco has bought that in the 1970s; it has not done anything with it but has created a rule that prohibits me from building a house in my own land. They didn’t even give us money for our land,” says a distressed farmer.

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Left with no option — since their houses were bursting at the seams — some of the farmers, though, did flout the “rules” and erect structures on the land which was previously theirs. Pakash Patil of Pargaon village is fighting for the cause of these so-called interlopers and trying to coax Cidco to legalise the houses in this encroached land. “It’s a 2,000-hectare airport project of which it (Cidco) already has 1,500 hectares and it wants 500 hectares which is ours. In 1970, when they took away our land, Cidco had to expand our village every 10 years. Since it didn’t, we have built houses on the land that was taken away from us, as the next generation came to our house. There was a reason for building those houses. It was our need and not luxury. You can’t call that illegal. We are asking Cidco to make that legal,” says Patil who has done his doctorate in poultry. At the same time, Patil, on behalf of the villagers, is asking the authorities to “show us the land where we are going to be shifted. We want to see the rehab package, which includes the house cost, the cultivated-land cost and the amount of land you will keep for us to expand in future. We are thinking about 2060 now when our kids will have their kids.”

Cidco Managing Director Tanaji Satre says: “Land acquisition has to be done according to government guidelines. Whatever they are asking has to be studied carefully, which the Collector Commissioner is doing. It’s not a simple issue. Earlier, they had demanded money for their land which we are not looking into now. We are working towards the formula of giving them 12.5 per cent of developed land. We had a meeting with leaders from the affected area recently on this. They mentioned the percentage they want. The objective now is to reach a workable formula for both the parties involved.”

With dusk falling, the sun, about to take refuge behind the mountains, sheds a soft yellow beam on the face of rice paddy and mangroves in Pargaon where the airport will have its twin runway. This acre of land was taken away from the farmers without compensating them in 1953 by the government on the pretext of using it for farmers’ welfare. In 2060, when “our kids will have their kids” there will be no mountains (it will be blown to bits to create space for take-off), no place for the sun to hide behind, no rice fields, no mangroves, and if there is none of these, there will be no villages.