The activists protesting against the proposed Ratnagiri Refinery & Petrochemicals Project (RRPL) at Barsu in Ratnagiri district of coastal Konkan region on Monday questioned Maharashtra Industries Minister Uday Sawant’s claim that the State Government had obtained the consent letters of farmers from whom it acquired 2,500 acres of land for the controversial project.
In a statement put out on the Facebook page Sustainable Konkan Movement used as a medium by the affected villagers to disseminate information about the ongoing anti-RRPL agitation, leading activist Sachin Sawant said: “State Industries Minister Uday Samant is going around the town claiming that the state government has obtained consent letters from farmers from whom it has acquired 2,500 acres of land for RRPL. We would like to see the names of the farmers who have given their land for the project. There is a strong possibility the list of farmers from whom the state government has purportedly acquired land for the project may contain names of such farmers with whom the district authorities have indulged in benami transactions. We have a reason to believe that these benami transactions have taken place between 2019 and 2022”.
“Going by the manner in which the state government has gone about acquiring the land for RRPL, we suspect that the state government is going all out to acquire the land for the project forcibly from farmers,” Sawant said.
Sawant said in his statement that “if anything, the minister is talking technical terms of having acquired the land required for the project from the affected farmers, while ignoring the resolutions passed by the affected villages”
Talking separately to media persons, Sawant said that all the six affected villages in the affected region had passed resolutions that they were against RRPL being located at Barsu.
Sawant also appealed to the farmers from whom the state government acquired the land for the project not to allow the land to be used for RRPL> “You people (farmers) have not acquired this land. You have got this land from your ancestors. You are merely trustees of the land. This land has taken care of your earlier generations. You will be earning your livelihood doing farming on this land. In fact, you have to protect your land and nature in our area for future generations. My request to you is: learn from your mistakes, get united and fight for the cause”.
The development came on a day the Maharashtra Industries Minister Uday Samant reiterated that the State Government would not go ahead with the RRPL without the consent of the affected farmers in the six villages surrounding the project site.
In a statement made a day after he called on NCP chief Sharad Pawar and other party leaders to brief them about the state government’s stand on the RRPL, Samant said: “Yesterday, representatives of the locals who are protesting against the RRPL met Pawar, and later CM Shinde separately. I conveyed a clear message that the project will not be taken up without the consent and co-operation of the local people”.
It may be recalled that on April 12, 2018, an Indian consortium comprising Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Saudi Arabian Oil Co (Saudi Aramco) for setting an oil refinery and petroleum products complex in Rajapur taluka of Ratnagiri district.
After the then ruling Shiv Sena which ruled the state along with BJP, opposed the location of the project at Nanar in Ratnagiri, then chief minister Uddahv Thackeray had written to the Centre for locating the project at Barsu, a request that the Narendra Modi government accepted.
Meanwhile, the affected villagers who had suspended their on-going agitation for three days on April 28 are likely to resume their agitation in the coming days.
