Navi Mumbai: Exactly one year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited Uran and handed over to five project affected villagers the promissory note of giving them the compensation land under the 12.5% Scheme, several angry villagers shaved off their heads in protest on Sunday as the pending land compensation has still not come to them from Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) authorities.
Talking to Times of India, one of the representatives of PAPs, Bhushan Patil, said, “We are rather shocked that despite the assurance and the five promissory notes handed over to the villagers by the PM Modi on August 16, 2014, we have yet not got the actual compensation. That is why, some of the villagers shaved their heads in protest to highlight this much pending issue.”
Patil, who is also one of the 3000 PAPs whose land was taken to develop the JNPT port zone of total area 2584 hectares way back in 1984, said that they will continue to agitate till all the affected villagers get the promised land.
“The JNPT township came up in 1989, after we gave up our ancestral lands and paddy farms. We were earlier promised a total of 160 Ha area land under the 12.5% Compensation Scheme in Uran taluka. Later, the promised land area to be given was reduced to 111 Ha. But it is still pending for three decades,” added Patil.
The villagers who participated in the Sunday agitation said that their hopes of getting the compensation land package were revived last year, after PM Modi personally visited JNPT for a function and gave away the promissory notes to a token five farmers. However, even these five farmers have not yet got the land.
When TOI contacted the chairman of JNPT, Neeraj Bansal, he said, “One must take into account that this land compensation matter is over 30 years old, yet in the past 11 months we we expedited the issue so that the beneficiaries are quickly compensated. JNPT is doing its best to ensure that all the concerned PAPs soon get their due land.”
Bansal added that earlier there was some disparity on the number of beneficiaries in their list and that of the Raigad collector; so all these issues are being looked into at the earliest. He further informed that a part of the land is also to be cleared by the ministry of environment and forests, but it should be done in the next two to three months.
However, the villagers are currently frustrated. “Some of the JNPT insiders have told us that the land compensation package has been further delayed due to certain bureaucratic hurdles. We will again try to have a fresh dialogue with JNPT officers and also state government in this regard,” said another PAP.