600 hectares acquired for project till now

Mumbai: Out of the 10,000 hectares required for the ambitious Mumbai-Nagpur expressway, the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) has managed to purchase only 600 hectares of land till now.

However, minister Eknath Shinde has said that farmers have given consent for 2,500 hectares of land.

The MSRDC officials claimed that by the end of December, 75 per cent of land would be purchased for the expressway. The government intends to commence the civil work of the project by January 2018.

“We have started the bidding process simultaneously and will be in a position to award the contract in three months so that the construction work for the expressway begins on time and we achieve our target,” said Eknath Shinde, MSRDC minister.

Earlier, the authority has adopted land pooling (acquiring land in exchange for a developed land) method to purchase land for the project. However, the method failed to attract farmers and resulted in a tepid response.

Now, the government is acquiring land through land acquisition act, wherein an owner of the land is paid five times higher than the ready reckoner rate of the property.

“The land acquisition process was started in July, and till now we have managed to acquire 603.54 hectares of land and have paid around `470 crore to the farmers,” said Kiran Kurundkar, Joint Managing Director of MSRDC.  

Mumbai-Nagpur expressway also known as ‘Samruddhi’ is a 706.2km long and 120-feet-wide.

It intends to cut the travel time from sixteen to six hours between Mumbai and Nagpur.