It’s like a congregation of hundreds of lottery winners who have gathered for the prize money. The sense of anticipation, the wait for the riches is palpable in the air once you reach the villages of Nimgaon, Dhavadi, Kendur and Kanersar in the Khed-Shirur talukas of Pune district where farmers have been taking time off to discuss the bonanza coming their way.

As many as 1,269 villagers are awaiting payment to the tune of Rs 212 crore for their 1,249 hectares of non-cultivable land that has been acquired by the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) on behalf of the state government. Curiously, this stretch of arid land lies almost contiguous to huge tracts of highly fertile land that grows cauliflower, beetroot, onions and potatoes for Pune and even Mumbai.

With the entire payment to be made in one lot in the next two weeks, the few nationalised banks that have branches in the region — Union Bank of India, State Bank of India and Bank of Maharashtra — have started wooing these unlikely inheritors of wealth with investments plans of many genre. Unfazed by all the attention, the villagers are making their own plans — purchase of cultivable land in slightly distant villages being one of the prominent ones.

Baba Shinde, an onion trader from Nimgaon, and his three brothers are looking forward to the compensation for 40 acres. At Rs 17 lakh a hectare, he and his brothers will be paid Rs 2.75 crore. “Much of this money will be used to buy fresh land since that is the best investment right now,” he says, waving at the sprawling terrain of uncultivable land that has suddenly unlocked value and proved a windfall for many. Shinde owns 12 more acres of cultivable land.

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