Ploughing Into Trouble: The Battle for Purandar Airport

The standoff over Purandar is a cautionary tale for India’s infrastructure ambitions, with lessons for planners to treat farmers as stakeholders and not as obstacles

Pune: It was meant to be a gateway to global connectivity. A gleaming new international airport near Pune, poised to catapult Western Maharashtra into the world market. But nearly a decade after the Purandar International Airport Project was first approved in 2014, progress has been halting, hamstrung by a fierce and unusually organised rural resistance. The airport, intended to occupy over 2,800 hectares across seven fertile villages in Saswad taluka, now finds itself not on a flight path to prosperity, but mired in a prolonged and politically sensitive standoff.

At the heart of the dispute lies a fundamental dilemma: development versus livelihoods. The Maharashtra government, led by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and his mercurial deputy Ajit Pawar, has positioned the airport as a vital infrastructure project. With ambitions of creating a world-class facility, the state envisions the airport as a hub that will unlock global markets for local agricultural produce and connect the region’s burgeoning economy with international trade circuits. But for the villagers of Pargaon Memane, Munjwadi, Khanwadi, Udachi Wadi, Vanpuri, Ekhatpur and Kumbharvalan, these grand plans spell the end of a rural resurgence carefully nurtured over the past decade.

The roots of the farmers' ire run deep. Since a 2016 notification flagged their villages as the proposed site for the airport, opposition has simmered. The discontent boiled over in March 2025, when the state government declared the entire project zone as an industrial area under the aegis of the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC). Farmers, many of whom have transitioned successfully into horticulture thanks to the Purandar Upsa Irrigation Scheme, now see the airport not as a promise but a threat - a bulldozer aimed squarely at their newfound prosperity.

Their protests have grown increasingly defiant. From symbolic hunger strikes and gram sabha resolutions to stonewalling official surveys and clashing with the police, the movement has grown beyond routine grievance into a grassroots assertion of autonomy. The tragic death of a woman during a lathi-charge, though contested by the authorities, has further inflamed tensions. What was initially administrative resistance has now evolved into a political tinderbox.

The state government, meanwhile, appears caught between urgency and unease. Ajit Pawar has claimed that 60 percent of landowners have agreed to the acquisition - a figure that is both contested and opaque. Even assuming its accuracy, the remaining 40 percent represents the politically sensitive and agriculturally rich core of the land in question. Pawar’s assurances that the district collector is “looking into the matter” have done little to cool tempers.

The government’s developmental rhetoric hinges on the airport’s economic promise. Officials argue that Western Maharashtra’s agricultural produce - sugarcane, figs, custard apple, vegetables - would find new international markets through air cargo. Fadnavis has pitched the airport as the linchpin of a wider regional upliftment plan, linking it with road and rail corridors like the Shakti Peeth Highway and the Pune-Nashik railway line. But these too face similar resistance, suggesting that the pushback is not just about the airport, but a broader pattern of rural backlash against top-down planning.

Part of the problem is perception. The state has yet to announce compensation rates, fuelling suspicion that land prices will be undervalued or, worse, hijacked by speculative middlemen. Villagers claim that some lands have already been traded with brokers. In the absence of transparency, even offers of compensation ring hollow.

The resistance has found allies in unlikely corners. Retired Justice B.G. Kolse Patil had led a protest march to the District Collectorate. Sharad Pawar, the patriarch of Maharashtra politics, was lobbied by farmers who accused the state of betrayal. “We are not against the airport,” they insisted, “but we will not give even an inch of our land.” Such language echoes a growing sentiment in India’s rural hinterlands that development imposed without consent is no development at all.

Politicians, always wary of agrarian unrest in an election-heavy state, are treading carefully. Suggestions from local Shiv Sena MLA Vijay Shivtare to build an IT park on barren land nearby have met with little enthusiasm, and justly so. To expect horticulture-dependent farmers to abandon their land in exchange for hypothetical IT jobs is to misunderstand both the culture and economics of rural India.

The state’s challenge now is not merely technical (surveying land or negotiating price) but strategic. Can it reframe development not as an edict from Mumbai, but as a collaborative vision? There are precedents for successful land pooling and community-led infrastructure in India. But they demand trust, clarity and above all, genuine dialogue - qualities in short supply in the Purandar saga thus far.

The clock is ticking. The government still clings to its timeline: construction to start by May 2026, operations by 2029. Yet the arithmetic of deadlines may not add up if the political calculus is misjudged.