After decades of playing the poor cousin to Mumbai’s glamorous business hubs of Nariman Point and Bandra-Kurla, Navi Mumbai came into its own only in this century. The Ambanis of Reliance and the IT sector woke up to a well-planned near-ghost town just a short distance from Mumbai and Navi Mumbai got a fresh breath of life. Suddenly, BPO companies moved into once pastoral villages like Nerul, Khoparkhairane and Belapur and the yuppies began to zip around in fancy wheels.
The calm of Navi Mumbai was shattered on Holi last week when an ordinary eve-teasing incident resulted in a full-blown riot between migrant porters and the original farmers in the area. “It was a fight waiting to happen since relations between the porters and the farmers were never cordial,” says Shashikant Mhatre, a local school teacher.
Local residents blame the politicians from the ruling NCP for the ongoing trouble. About five years ago, the state government earmarked land acquired from the villagers at Ghansoli village for a housing complex for the porters — the Mathadis, most of whom were employed in the wholesale steel and vegetable markets in the area that service Mumbai.
The villagers felt that the Mathadis, manual labourers like themselves, were depriving the original inhabitants of employment opportunities. The immediate cause of the conflict happened to be the location of the sprawling Simplex housing colony of the porters which cut across the ancestral lands of the villagers, thereby causing bad blood between both communities. “The local villagers used the housing complex compound as a short-cut to their lands, thereby sparking off conflict,” said a police official. The residents of the buildings fenced their properties and prevented the villagers from passing through the area.
Though the City Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) had paid off the farmers whose lands were acquired in the 1970s, they continued to cultivate the land in the absence of any development work being carried out. The farmers were subsequently pushed out without any fresh compensation when the authorities decided to construct houses and factories in the wake of the economic boom in Navi Mumbai, say observers.
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