Mumbai: A major expressway in India’s Maharashtra has become a source of friction, with farmers unwilling to give up land for the project.

The 710-kilometre Mumbai-Nagpur expressway, also known as the “prosperity corridor” would need 20,820 hectares of land and dozens of farmers expected to give up their land for the project are fiercely opposed to it.

Farmers’ leaders have led protests on several occasions and Sharad Pawar, president of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and former union agriculture minister, plans to hold a farmers’ meeting on May 29, to help fight for those who could be losing their land.

The super communications expressway will traverse through 10 districts — Nagpur, Wardha, Amravati, Washim, Buldhana, Aurangabad, Jalna, Ahmednagar, Nashik — and Thane and provide two million jobs, with the Maharashtra government promising that the project would take the state 20 years ahead of others in India.

But farmers are not impressed by the Rs314.27 billion (Dh18 billion) prosperity corridor, which will pass through land that they do not want to give up.

They have thrown their weight behind Pawar’s effort to fight the plans.

After meeting Pawar on May 10, the farmers got the assurance that he would meet them on May 29, when he would also announce his party’s stand on the expressway and decide on what to do next.

Baban Harne, conveyor of Maharashtra Shetkari Sangharsh Samiti, a farmers’ committee, said, “The government has started acquiring land arbitrarily without following legal procedures under the land acquisition laws. It has been using the police force to suppress the voice of farmers. We will step up protests after meeting Pawar again,” he said, as reported in the Hindustan Times.

The Mumbai Mirror reported that a villager in Thane district, Kamlabai Kashivale, had declared that she would rather chop off her thumb rather than give her thumb impression to give consent on a document for sale of her land.

The government has allocated Rs100 billion for land acquisition which include land pooling as well as monetary compensation. Acquiring land by using the land acquisition law would be exorbitant and so the state wants to get land through the process of land pooling.

The land pooling model is based on what Andhra Pradesh did to build its new capital Amravati whereby farmers transferred ownership rights to the government which develops, then returns a small part to the owners, who will get a higher market value. Farmers will also get an annuity for 10 years with an annual 10 per cent increase.

But many farmers are not too happy with this model, as highway projects take years to be completed many of them yet to receive compensation from earlier projects.

The situation is complicated as farmers fear losing land that they say is fertile and also losing their livelihoods.

Moreover, many have not found any government promises reliable and even those dependent on land but do not own, especially the tribals, feel they may become penniless.