“Hee zameen sona ugavate (These fields sprout gold),” said 73-year-old Balkrishna Patil as he tottered to the polling booth clutching a paper marking his protest. “My one acre land, for which today they are offering Rs 10 lakh, has sustained generations before me and will take care of generations to come. Even if they offer Rs 2 crore, I won’t part with it,” he asserts.

The decision to seek people’s votes was taken by the Maharashtra Government in the wake of a local agitation against the Mukesh Ambani promoted RIL’s proposed 10,000 hectare multi-product SEZ. Covering a span of 45 villages in Raigad, it is touted as the largest SEZ in the country. The 22 villages that went in for voting on Sunday are spread out over 2,992 hectares in the command area around the Hetawane dam, villages that are seeking exclusion from the project.

Raigad Collector Nipun Vinayak however differed on the rhetoric. “It is not correct to call it voting. We have recorded 6,151 opinions. These are amongst the 30,057 villagers whom we had served notices earlier . It will take us another 15 days to analyse the data before we can send it to the state government,” he said.

Parvati Narhari Patil (75) from Vashi village was married off when she was in Class VII. But within a year she was left to fend for herself by her husband. Said her 29-year-old nephew Suhas Madvi, “Since then she has been surviving by tilling a half acre land given to her by my father. What will hundreds like her do once their land is taken away? Our homes are located in the fields itself, which means they too will be uprooted even though the company claims otherwise.”

According to Vaishali Patil, a Pen-based social worker, over the last three years only 13 per centof the farmers have sold their land for the proposed SEZ. “Twenty five years ago, the state Government spent Rs 394 crore on constructing the Hetawane dam. At a time when its benefits have just started reaching the farmers, the Government wants to gift away the fertile land and the dam water to Reliance,” said Patil.

Former High Court judge Justice B G Kolse Patil said, “RIL has spent hundreds of crores on purchasing each acre of land for the Bandra Kurla Complex. Here they are paying a measly Rs 10 lakh per acre for such fertile land. They know tomorrow this land will be prime real estate after the construction of the Sewri-Nhava Sheva sea link.”