Raigad (Maharashtra), March 23 May be, Nandigram has made people wiser.In a scene that could bring back the horrendous memories of the West Bengal village protesting land acquisition for industry, nearly 5,000 angry farmers blockaded the busy Mumbai-Goa highway for hours Friday to protest the takeover of agricultural land for a special economic zone (SEZ), to be set up by Reliance Group.The blockade was called off after the Maharashtra government promised to withdraw the acquisition notices.The farmers, belonging to the Jagatikaran Virodhi Kriti Samiti (anti-globalization action committee), refused to budge despite police pressure on them to disperse and the situation at one time threatened to spin out of control.The farmers, who blockaded the road at the strategic Vadkhal check-post, relented only when district collector Dadasaheb Zagde read out the government statement to them promising that it would not acquire their lands for the proposed SEZ in Raigad district.The assurance that the government would withdraw the land acquisition notices, issued to farmers in the district's Konkan region, came in both houses of the state legislature when members raised a point of propriety over the farmer's stir.While Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh made the statement in the legislative assembly, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Harshvardhan Patil repeated it in the upper house even as tension was building on the highway, 110 km from the state capital.Farmers of 46 villages in Pen, Panvel and Uran tehsils of the Raigad district, where Asia's biggest SEZ is coming up over 14,000 hectares of land, resorted to the road blockade, saying that forced land acquisition was continuing in spite of the chief minister's repeated assurances to the contrary.Earlier, the collector and the district superintendent of police Rajkumar Vatkar had faxed a message to the chief minister saying the situation on the highway was volatile and could go out of control anytime.The agitation was led by former minister and People's and Workers' Party (PWP) leader N.D. Patil, Vaishali Patil and Ulka Mahajan.While the government has taken a position that it would not acquire land anymore for the Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Group which is setting up the SEZ, the company has had little success so far in wooing the farmers to part with their land in spite of raising the price offer from Rs.600,000 to Rs.1 million per acre.A few Reliance personnel had, in fact, been roughed up by a group of women in Pen Tuesday when they offered compensation at the earlier rate to some farmers contrary to the company's promise.
(c) Indo-Asian News Service
