Around 72 villages from Maharashtra’s Raigad district have started a sit-in demonstration in front of the tehsil office in Mangaon against the multi-billion-dollar ambitious Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC). .
The villagers who began the agitation on Wednesday will hold dharna against the acquisition of 67,000 acres of land from these 72 villages. Each village will submit its letter of opposition to the project in the government office during the dharna andolan.
Leading the agitation, civil rights activist Ulka Mahajan said that the land acquisition notices issued under the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) act would destroy the farming in this area, leaving the people landless.
Shreenivas Khandekar of Samarpan, an organisation working against the project said that the farmers were opposing the land acquisition in this area. "The names on the title deeds have already been changed and notices have been sent to gram panchayats. This agitation will intensify in the coming time if the government decides to force its way," he said.
The DMIC project is a State-sponsored industrial development project spanning 1,483 km in length across six States – Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi. It is a joint venture between India and Japan, with initial contribution of $90 billion jointly. It incorporates 11 investment regions and 13 industrial areas and promises to double employment potential and triple industrial output in five years.
The National Alliance of People’s Movement last month organised the Mumbai Delhi Sangharsh Yatra against the proposed DMIC, terming it as corporate-politician-bureaucrat -technocrat-land shark nexus.