PUNE, April 5:Herer is a land acquisition story with a happy ending. Farmers who parted with their agricultural land last year are now all set to turn entrepreneurs, pooling in their resources to buy back 15 per cent of the developed land and start their own production units.

As per the scheme of the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) which acquired the farm land last year, farmers can buy back 15 per cent of the land at half the industrial rate. And that is what the farmers are doing at the two sites — the Ranjangaon industrial area and the multi-product Bharat Forge Special Economic Zone (SEZ) area in Khed-Shirur.

At the MIDC’s Ranjangaon industrial area, 38 farmers from Khardelwadi and Nimgaon have come together to set up the Mahaganpati Logistics and Engineering Works Private Ltd, a company which they will be registering within the next five days. They have bought back 18.27 acres, with some help from the Pune District Cooperative Bank, Shirur.

Five farmers have been appointed as the company’s directors. The managing director is Milind Kenjale, a farmer who gave up almost 27 acres of his land for industrial use. On the company’s future plans, Kenjale says they will lease out a part of the land to raise some funds to construct a warehouse or other employment-generating unit on the remaining land.

Another director, Vithal Dasgude, adds that there are plans for a hotel also. “Also in the pipeline is an employment unit to provide assistance to the industrial sector,” he says. The profits generated will be distributed among the members, in proportion to the size of their land holdings that was acquired.

Sharing a similar vision are the project-affected farmers of the multi-product Bharat Forge-MIDC SEZ in Khed-Shirur. Here, 1,200 farmers are pooling in their resources to buy back 250 hectares of developed land. They plan to register their company in the next week.

“These are good initiatives and we will support them,” says district collector Prabhakar Deshmukh.

SDO Gajanan Patil adds that they have held discussions with the farmers on the possible avenues to ensure regular returns. Here too, they plan to lease out half the land, and start a production unit on the remaining.

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