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Samruddhi Mahamarg and Land Acquisition Across Vidarbha

Samruddhi Mahamarg and Land Acquisition Across Vidarbha
Samruddhi Mahamarg and Land Acquisition Across Vidarbha

The Hindu Hrudaysamrat Balasaheb Thackeray Maharashtra Samruddhi Mahamarg, the Mumbai-Nagpur “Prosperity” Expressway, cut through the heart of Vidarbha, uprooting families and farmers in its path.


Whether they gave up land willingly or under pressure, and whether the payouts truly made up for what was lost, remains a defining question of this megaproject’s legacy.


An Unprecedented Land Acquisition and Initial Resistance


The Samruddhi Expressway is one of India’s largest infrastructure undertakings: a 701 km, six-lane superhighway linking Vidarbha’s largest city, Nagpur, to the state’s capital, Mumbai.


Building it meant securing a massive corridor of land across 10 districts. By 2016–17, as project plans rolled out, officials began approaching roughly 24,000 farmers to obtain about 9,000 hectares (nearly 25,000 acres) of land. The reaction was swift and fierce.


Large-scale protests erupted along the proposed route, from Vidarbha to Marathwada. In village after village, farmers chased away land survey teams. “Samruddhi murdabad!” became a rallying cry among protesters opposed to surrendering ancestral fields.

Farmer unions and even opposition politicians jumped in. Veteran leader Sharad Pawar addressed agitating cultivators in Aurangabad, framing the highway as a threat to rural livelihoods.


Many cultivators at the time vowed not to give up their land at any cost. “Who’s going to benefit from this project? There are parallel roads which can be widened,” argued Baban Harne, a farmers’ leader in 2017, accusing the government of pushing the expressway to benefit a few insiders.


Harne declared that peasants would not part with land “even if the state government comes with any kind of compensation.” Such distrust stemmed from decades of bitter experiences with land acquisition in India.


Under the old laws, compensation was meagre and often tied up in court for years. Villagers feared losing both their property and their livelihood security. In interior regions of Vidarbha, land is life: “land is not an asset but a livelihood for villagers for generations together,” observed Radheshyam Mopalwar, the IAS officer helming the highway project.


Early surveys reflected these anxieties; only half the locals outright supported the project, while the rest were wary or opposed. Facing this wall of resistance, the Maharashtra government knew it had to radically rethink its approach to win the people over.


Turning Protest into Consent through Compensation


By mid-2017, the state rolled out an extraordinary land-for-highway offer that would flip the script of the Samruddhi saga.


Maharashtra decided to pay well above the norm, an eye-popping five times the market value of the land, to every landholder who agreed to sell directly to the highway authority.

This was even more than the four-times multiplier mandated under the new Land Acquisition Act of 2013. The unprecedented payouts were coupled with promises of additional money for assets like wells, orchards and houses on the property.


Officials openly refer to it as a “humongous carrot” that turned protests into participation. “We paid ₹8,000 crore to acquire 25,000 acres from 34,000 families,” says Mopalwar, who led the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) in charge of the project. Land acquisition that normally drags on for years was completed in just 18 months, a record in India.


Any delay, authorities note, would have cost the exchequer an additional ₹5,600 crore annually in escalating project costs, so the generous settlements were viewed as the lesser cost.


On the ground in rural Vidarbha and beyond, the strategy had a dramatic effect. “Initially there was resistance. But once the first few payouts were effected, word of mouth did the work,” recalls Priyadarshi Gudam, one of 320 young communicators MSRDC hired to negotiate with farmers.


These outreach teams, many with social work backgrounds, spread out to explain the compensation deals, answer questions, and even advise villagers how to invest their sudden windfalls wisely. The impact was visible in the numbers.


Roughly 84–93% of farmers ultimately opted to sell through voluntary agreements rather than face compulsory takeover. The remaining holdouts, often cases with absentee owners or family title disputes, were handled via formal acquisition, but even there, the law’s high compensation benchmarks applied.


In practical terms, the once-defiant farming communities were now signing sale deeds en masse, lured by payouts beyond their imaginations. “My family resisted initially, but when we were informed about the compensation amount, we changed our mind,” admits Madhukar Pande, a farmer in Jalna district who surrendered 1.5 acres for ₹31 lakh per acre.


For context, Pande’s annual income from that land was barely ₹3–5 lakh; suddenly, he was handed decades’ worth of earnings in one go.


Similar stories echo across the expressway’s path. In Aurangabad, the Kolte family, initially at the forefront of anti-Samruddhi agitations, agreed to sell 9.5 acres of their ancestral farm when the offer climbed to an astounding ₹23.4 crore. “The family was emotionally attached to the property, but when we started calculating the compensation… we changed our minds,” says Dnyaneshwar Kolte, whose clan received the project’s largest single payout. His brother Bhausaheb, who had led protests in their village, ultimately relented too – after an official spent hours under a mango tree convincing the villagers that this deal meant future prosperity.


After receiving his share of over ₹7 crore, Bhausaheb did what “any son-of-the-soil would do”: he bought more farmland nearby to keep farming, even as he built a large new bungalow for the family.


In the Buldhana district of Vidarbha, farmer Ishwar Bodke likewise saw a windfall. Three acres of his land were acquired for ₹1.7 crore, a “good compensation package,” he says – and an unexpected side effect was that surrounding land values quadrupled, from roughly ₹15 lakh per acre to ₹60 lakh. Bodke notes that thanks to the highway, if he ever needs cash in the future, he can sell much less land than before because each acre is now worth so much more.



To ensure fairness, the government set uniform rates and guidelines. Compensation was calculated using updated market rates (taking the higher of official registry values or recent sale averages), then multiplied. In irrigated belt areas of Vidarbha known for double-cropping or orchards, farmers got even higher bonuses on top of the base rate before the 5× formula was applied.


District-wise data shows the scale of payouts: for example, in Buldana district alone, farmers were paid a collective ₹613.7 crore, in Wardha ₹370 crore, and nearly ₹286 crore in Amravati, reflecting the highway’s hefty footprint in Vidarbha.

As a senior official put it, “Offering a huge compensation package to farmers was the best option” to meet both development goals and farmers’ expectations. By 2019, state authorities declared 100% of the required land acquired, an outcome few would have believed possible during the tumultuous start of the project.


Mixed Fortunes: Were Farmers Fairly Compensated?


The rapid land deals and multi-crore pay-outs earned the Samruddhi Mahamarg praise as a “test case” in smooth execution.


Many farmers in Vidarbha and other regions indeed feel they were treated generously, especially compared to past projects. “Farmers who gave their land for the project got a good compensation package,” acknowledges Ishwar Bodke of Buldana.

Surveys found most recipients did not squander the money; instead, they bought alternative fields, built sturdy houses, or started new businesses, effectively converting land into capital. Government officials even organised skill-development programmes for the displaced farmers’ children, hoping to turn this upheaval into an opportunity for the next generation.


From the state’s perspective, fair compensation was not just about cutting cheques. It was about ensuring “farmers would not suffer,” as the project’s land acquisition policy stated, by providing for lost assets and future livelihoods. The sheer scale of consent, over 34,000 families agreeing to sell, suggests that the vast majority found the terms acceptable, if not advantageous.


Yet, behind this overall success story are individuals who feel short-changed or coerced. Some marginal farmers and landless labourers argue that money alone cannot compensate for the disruption to their lives.


In Thane district, just outside Vidarbha, a small Adivasi hamlet named Chiradpada saw all its four hut-dwelling families ordered to vacate for a Samruddhi overpass. These indigenous fisherfolk, who live off a nearby river and have odd farm jobs, were offered cash but no rehabilitation plan. The government had fast-tracked the highway by waiving the usual Social


Impact Assessment, a step that would have identified non-landowners needing resettlement. “Even if they give us money for taking away our house, how will we settle in a new village?” asks Vasanti Waghe, who fears losing not just her home but her community and income from fishing. For families like hers, the promise of a cheque brings little comfort. Their skills and livelihoods are tied to the land and water, not easily rebuilt elsewhere.


There were also instances of hard bargaining that left some feeling the process was not entirely voluntary. Officials made it clear that those who refused the direct purchase offers would be penalised, receiving 25% less compensation once the land was acquired under the law. “The government promised they won’t force farmers to give up land,” notes Kapil Dhamne of Chiradpada, “but in some cases they have threatened them with low compensation if they resist,” Dhamne alleges that when he initially declined to consent, an acquisition officer warned he’d only be paid for his house after he signed away the farmland.


He still held out. In the end, the authorities invoked compulsory acquisition of his property. He finally received ₹90 lakh for his demolished house after repeated petitions, but remains uncertain how much he will get for the fields he refused to sell.


Another farmer, Haribhau Dhamne, claims the agency hurriedly obtained signatures from a few of his co-heirs and treated that as “consent” for selling their joint land, sidestepping full agreement. “This is cheating farmers,” he says, pointing to his family’s name still splintered across the official 7/12 land records. Such accounts, while not representative of most land deals, highlight the power imbalance some villagers felt, that the state ultimately held the upper hand, wielding either an alluring payout or the threat of an even lower, forced settlement.


Even among those who took the money, there are murmurs about what came after. In Wardha district of Vidarbha, farmers appreciated the compensation but later protested the highway’s design. The new expressway was fenced with retaining walls, cutting off access to some remaining farmlands. “There is no road to our fields… We were promised village roads,” complained Sanjay Deshmukh, a 55-year-old whose village now lies adjacent to the corridor. Such grievances serve as a reminder that fair compensation is not just about the amount paid, but also about fulfilling the commitments made to those displaced.


The story of the Samruddhi Mahamarg’s land acquisition is a complex portrait of development and dispossession.


In the span of a few years, tens of thousands of farmers, from Vidarbha’s cotton-growing plains to Marathwada’s dry villages, went from chanting slogans against the highway to depositing government compensation cheques in their bank accounts.

Many have emerged better off materially, with new land, new houses or a financial cushion that farming alone never provided. Others continue to grapple with what they lost, be it a way of life tied to the land or a sense of agency in the face of a state mega-project.


As Maharashtra extends the expressway further into Vidarbha’s interior, it is once again offering five times the land rates and reassuring residents that opposition will not be met with injustice.


The experiences of those displaced by the first phase of Samruddhi suggest that a fat compensation cheque can indeed buy cooperation, but true prosperity for these villagers will be measured in the years ahead, as we see whether the highway’s promised benefits reach the very communities that sacrificed their land for its construction.


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