Lavasa rocks with protests

India’s biggest lake city project planned on 12,500 acres in the outskirts of Pune by Lavasa Corporation has begun to rock on a different note.

Land acquisition from farmers and transparency-related issues  relating to agreements signed by Lavasa with the state government have come into sharp focus. These issues are likely to become larger in the run up to the coming assembly elections.

Right to Information (RTI) crusaders and Magsaysay awardees such as Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, Aruna Roy and Medha Patkar are among those who have demanded an independent probe to set the record straight.

Driven by Lavasa Corporation, a subsidiary of  the Mumbai-based HCC Real Estate Ltd., the project was in the limelight in the past due to its association with NCP chief Sharad Pawar’s family and speedy clearances from Congress-NCP government.
The project has now begun to witness flashes of conflict between company officials and affected farmers led by National Alliance of People’s Movement (NAPM) leader Medha Patkar and others.

The most recent confrontation took place on May 19 when a group of farmers, Patkar, Left activist RP Nene and others visited some of the villages under the Lavasa project such as Mugaon, Gadle and Dhamanowhal and protested against construction of the Rs400-crore SpaceWorld edutainment centre that is coming up with inputs from National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA).

A day later an affected farmer, Dnyaneshwar Shedge, was arrested by the Paud police, put in the lock-up and later released on bail. Cases of trespassing, criminal intimidation and other charges were filed against Patkar and eight others.

 Last month, Kejriwal, former inspector general of police, SM Mushrif,  Bombay High Court advocate and former CBI officer YP Singh and senior advocate Nirmalkumar Suryavanshi, as members of the People’s Commission of Inquiry (PCI), tabled their  “interim report” on the state of the people affected by 12 dams and the Lavasa project in Pune district.

They demanded an “immediate inquiry” by an independent committee into the alleged complicity of the state government and “fraudulent and suspicious land deals”. This “people’s commission” (see box) was constituted on October 21, 2008 at the instance of various organisations and the decision was endorsed by Anna Hazare, former judge and human rights activist Justice H Suresh, Aruna Roy, Sandeep Pandey and Parasuraman, director, Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

‘All allegations are baseless’

Responding to a questionnaire from DNA, Lavasa Corporation’s assistant vice president (communications) Vaibhav Tiwari described Dnyaneshwar Shedge’s allegation that his land was acquired fraudulently by the company as “baseless” stating that “Shedge and his family had sold their rights in respect of  their 11-acre land in survey no.60 of village Mugaon to several people prior to Lavasa’s purchase of this land.

The rights of the land were sold and money was received repeatedly in the year 1996, 2002 and again in 2003 . Lavasa purchased this land from the last owner in 2007, Tiwari said.

He said that even though Shedge had sold off his rights, he kept on pressurising the company for additional money to be paid, which was not due to him legally.
Although Lavasa Corporation agreed to pay some ex-gratia amount to Shedge, Tiwari said that Shedge has refused to accept his share unlike his family members. He claimed that Shedge was insisting that he should be paid “disproportionately and more than his other family members” and that  this was objected to by the other family members in writing.

Tiwari said that Shedge was now pressurising Lavasa Corporation by misleading Medha Patkar.

“The company has been repeatedly offering to Medha Patkar that it can show her documents, which clarify the position of the company, but Patkar has been avoiding for reasons best known to her,” he said.

Tiwari acknowledged that a criminal complaint has been lodged with the police against Patkar and her activists, including Shedge, on charges of delivering instigating speeches and provoking villagers to stop the construction work.