The Jewar International Airport in Noida will soon become a reality. This is because farmers have begun willingly parting with their lands as the Union Civil Aviation ministry has finally given the project in-principle approval.
So far, as many as 2,335 farmers have decided to part with 916 hectares of land for the proposed greenfield airport, thus meeting 75 per cent of the land requirements of the project. The in-principle approval for the airport was issued within a few months of the Yogi Adityanath government assuming office in Uttar Pradesh.
The project had been pending clearance with the Central government for over 10 years due to a lack of initiative from the Congress-led UPA government and the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led SP government as well as the BSP government headed by Mayawati in the state.
The total land required for the project is 1,334 hectares of which 116 hectares is government land. The administration needs to have the consent of at least 70 per cent farmers before it can start acquisition according to the Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act, 2013.
The major issue faced by the administration in acquiring the land was that the state government had earlier altered the land’s nomenclature from rural to urban, thereby halving the compensation the farmers would have received. The administration finally got over the issue by promising the farmers jobs at the new airport and equivalently priced plots.
The airport at Jewar is to be built at an estimated cost of Rs 15,754 crore.
A social impact assessment report on the project states that around 33.9 per cent of farmers own land less than 0.6 acres in size, while 39.6 per cent farmers own land measuring between 0.6 to 6 acres, 15.7 per cent farmers own land between 6 to 12 acres and only 5.1 per cent of farmers own between 12.5 and 18.7 acres of land in the area.