Confident Mhatre: Vashi's social activist is in no mood to give up his land for SEZs

Janaradhan Mukund Mhatre, 72, is the voice of a village called Vashi in the Raigad district of Maharashtra, some 100 km off Mumbai, where Reliance Industries (RIL) has plans to put up an SEZ that will be sprawled out over 14,000 hectares. Vashi is just one of the 47 villages whose dwellers are up in arms and even the mention of the name Reliance makes the 25,000-odd farmers in this region absolutely livid. The land here is lush green with storks gliding effortlessly over the paddy fields. Fondly called Anna Hazare by the villagers (after the country's renowned social activist), Mhatre speaks passionately of the land being the food provider. "SEZ or no SEZ, there is no question of giving up our land," thunders Mhatre, who himself owns three acres. A substantial part of the land in Raigad district is used to cultivate rice and paddy.

Mourya Murli Sawant is only 35 years old, but looks older. This farmer owns a three-acre piece of land in Mann village, not too far away from Pune's it district, Hinjewadi. On March 9 this year, Sawant was among the 2,000-odd farmers from Mann who protested against the government's move to acquire their land for the creation of special economic zones (SEZs). Bharat Forge, the Mahindra group and the Mumbai-based real estate group, the Hiranandanis, have plans to set up bases in this proposed SEZ. The day turned out to be fateful for Sawant who was shot in the thigh when the police opened fire to control the fiery crowd. Sawant still limps and has spent Rs 25,000 so far on his medical expenses. But the injury has only strengthened Sawant's resolve to hold on to every inch of his three-acre piece of land, on which he grows rice, sugarcane, potatoes and onions.

Mourya Murli Sawant/Farmer/Hinjewadi Shot in the thigh at a protest rally, the injury has strengthened his resolve to hold on to every inch of his three-acre piece of land.

Up north in Haryana's Jhajjar district, it's once again RIL that has announced plans of setting up an SEZ on 10,100 hectares of land, equivalent to 25,000 acres. One of the villages in the district, Nimana, alone has 1,000 acres of land of which 800 acres is fertile. The village grows a medley of crops like wheat, jowar and bajra. Chaudhary Azad Singh is one of the farmers tilling the land in Nimana. "We will not sell our land unless we get proper compensation," he says with a sense of finality. The reason for that tone is not hard to understand: The government is offering Rs 23.65 lakh per acre against an apparent market price of over Rs 50 lakh per acre. In Munda Kheda, another village in Jhajjar, Chaudhry Gaje Singh, a farmer and landowner, talks about agents doing the rounds for the past one month, attempting to coerce villagers to sell their land at rates of Rs 22 lakh per acre. "If we sell (at that rate) there's no benefit for us. The SEZ is not beneficial for us," shrugs Singh. He won't be only one in Munda Kheda who feels that way. Roughly 95 per cent of the village's population is involved in farming, earning Rs 25,000 per acre per year.

From Haryana in the north to Andhra Pradesh in the South, from West Bengal in the East to Maharashtra and Gujarat in the West, SEZ projects are mushrooming like a nuclear cloud-at least from the viewpoint of the farmer whose land and livelihood face the threat of being enveloped by gigantic corporate ambitions. As state governments and mega-corporations come around sniffing for juicy land deals in rural India, villagers reliant on agriculture are falling into three categories: One is a minority, which is willing to up and leave for a price (or for a job or for land in another place). The second bunch, which would make up the bulk of the farmers, refuses to move out because they feel the compensation being doled out in lieu of their land is obscenely low. And there's a third group that, come hell or high water, refuses to budge, unable to imagine a life without their plough, crop and land.

RAJ SINGH Hari Nagar/ Gurgaon district/ Haryana

Raj Singh is 40 years old and apart from being a farmer, he is also the Sarpanch of Hari Nagar village in Gurgaon district in Haryana. He holds 20 acres of land. He was with the Indian Army earlier before he came back to manage his ancestral land in the village. Singh, who is one of the bigger landowners in the village, is quite dismayed about the manner in which the land acquisition process is being done. "Yes, industrialisation is desirable and even necessary but the manner in which it is being done will not solve the problems of us villagers. Our income is already badly affected by saline water that has made our otherwise fertile land unfit for cultivation," says Singh. Singh, who has a son, is of the opinion that the government should have brought in the Sutlej Yamuna Link (SYL) canal if the intention was to help the farmers. Hari Nagar's villagers seem more comfortable being farmers than anything else. After all, that's what the farmers have been doing for years. "A farmer can only do his job best. He cannot be expected to do anything else," is Singh's point of view.

The genesis of the crisis may lie in the way governments have gone about identifying land on which SEZs will be housed, and the way they have valued the land. Here's how it works: The first step involves a survey where the villages for a particular SEZ are identified and the government through a land acquisition officer gets all the pertinent information on the land that is proposed to be acquired. Factors like the fertility of the land, as well as the number of trees and wells are some of the parameters considered when determining the value. This entire process takes anywhere between one and three months (in the case of the Bharat Forge SEZ, work relating to the survey has not started since the farmers are up in arms). Once that's done the land acquisition officer formally issues a notice-called the 4 (i) notice-indicating that the land will be acquired. This notice prohibits the farmer from developing the land any further, though he can object and a hearing will be given (in Raigad district, a hearing is currently in progress). At this stage, the land owners can question the compensation value as well. The final stage commences after the hearing is completed. Here, the land acquisition notices are issued under Section 6 which in effect is the complete transfer of land to the government. If the farmer has any objection whatsoever at this point in time, the only recourse is the High Court where the issue can pertain to only enhanced compensation. Not surprisingly, this is a time-consuming process with, worryingly, no guarantee that the judgment will go the farmer's way.

Throw in a generous helping of power politics, and there's little a farmer can do if the government wants his land. In Haryana, there has been clarity on how much the government will offer-though most farmers consider it inadequate-but that's not quite the case in most other states. "In lieu of the land that will be acquired, we were promised Rs 23.65 lakh per acre along with a plot of land measuring around 500-1,000 square feet and a job to one member of the family," says Singh of Nimana village. Singh is of course unhappy with that compensation, and claims to have conveyed his displeasure to Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.

The farmers in the north are not the only ones discontented with the reimbursement figures being flashed at them. In Raigad, for instance, the farmers put the value on a per acre basis at Rs 20 lakh while the government has placed it about Rs 1.35 lakh per acre. Whilst it would be tempting to accuse the villagers of harbouring outlandish expectations, the sheer difference between the two figures suggests there's room for bridging the gap. Meantime, Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh recently told BT that "the issue as far as the acquisition of land is concerned is clearly between the farmers and the SEZ developers."

Fair deal: Farmers in Gurgaon are left with no choice, but to move

It's not as if every Indian state is home to a mass of disgruntled farmers. In Tamil Nadu, which has close to 45 SEZs-the bulk of them around Chennai-in various stages of development, the process of such infrastructure-creation has been by and large smooth. The only exception is in Sriperumbudur, where farmers are being cajoled into selling their land at throwaway prices with village brokers playing a key role. E. Subrahmanian, based in Pondhur village in Sriperumbudur district, is one such farmer who owns just under an acre. He is 78 years old with a blood pressure problem. "In Pondhur, there are 500 families out of which 200 are farmers. About 75 per cent of the farmers have sold their land," he shrugs. Subrahmanian himself will sell his holding and the proceeds will be distributed among his children. The government is offering anywhere between Rs 1.75 lakh to Rs 3.75 lakh per acre though the farmer's demand is much more-they want Rs 40 lakh per acre.

The government for its part has some good reasons for pushing SEZs, a fillip for manufacturing, exports and job-creation being just some of the benefits. The problem is: Does it have to build these mini-cities on fertile agricultural land? In states like Maharashtra, wasteland may not be an option simply because there isn't much of it going around. In contrast, Gujarat has witnessed few controversies surrounding SEZ projects since it can fall back on acres of wasteland. The state has given the go-ahead to large industrial groups like Reliance and Essar to set up their SEZs. The Adani Group-promoted SEZ at Mundra is an instance of an SEZ being developed on wasteland. The SEZ will have some big projects like a power plant, a cement plant and an edible oil plant over 10,000 hectares of land. The project will also have an airstrip. The port, which forms the crux of the SEZ, has four multi-purpose berths and another four coming up. The adjoining villages, which depend on agriculture as a primary source of livelihood, are cut off from the project, at least 5- 6 km away. The land on which the SEZ will eventually be housed has soil that apart from being uncultivable needs a fair amount of work before any kind of work can start on it.

The farmers in Gujarat may be relatively untouched by the SEZ mania, but their counterparts in most parts of the rest of India aren't that lucky. Even in a best case scenario, in which the farmer is well compensated for his land, he still needs to figure out what to do with that money. That's why some farmers in Haryana are asking for, along with a fair value for their land, a secure job or an alternative piece of land. "Once our land is acquired, we will move to some other place which has sweet water where we will buy land and continue farming. A farmer cannot do business," says Raj Singh who is the sarpanch in Hari Nagar village in Gurgaon district.

Farmers in Pune: Ready to fight

Clearly a middle-ground needs to be found, but that can only happen if state governments communicate with the farmers, something many of them are not too enthusiastic about. Madhukar Thakur, an MAL in the Raigad district says: "The farmers are looking for stability in terms of cash and employment. I think the issue can be resolved if we sit with the farmers across the table," he says. Transparency is also the need of the day, with explanations provided on how the land is valued. Sure, expectations in some rural sections may border on the unrealistic, and corporate observers wonder why farmers are holding on to such vast tracts of land when they don't have the wherewithal to make all of it productive. Yet bulldozing their way into the rural heartland is hardly the solution for governments and corporates ostensibly keen on progress. The governments for their part have little problem in putting out the compensation numbers for land earmarked for SEZs but, as far as the farmers are concerned, price is one thing and value quite another.

-additional reporting by Shaleen Agrawal, Aman Malik and Nitya Varadarajan