Vadhavan port project faces continued resistance from Palghar villagers

Boats anchored on the jetty in Dhaka Dahanu village. File

Hundreds of women sit packed together under a tarpaulin shelter at the edge of a field. Some are on the bare ground, others on white plastic chairs, and red flags poke up over their heads. Past the tent, the fields are green and quiet. Nothing about them looks like it is up for sale.

Kalpana Devkar, 48, grows rice on two acres near Dahanu. Nobody had to persuade her to come, she says. “We are the bhumiputras (sons of the soil) of this land. We are the owners of this land. Why are they trying to steal our land from us?”

Her village, she says, gets by on its own. Jobs from the port would not change that, and she doubts they would last. “Why does the government want us to become servants?” she asks.

The Varor gathering is one stop in a run of protests against the port being built near Dahanu. Fifty-six organisations are part of it. Tribal families, farmers and fishing communities say the port will wreck marine life, end traditional fishing and damage the coast.

Politicians came too. Leaders of the Congress, the Shiv Sena (UBT) and the CPI(M) backed Friday’s (October 30, 2026) protest, and the stage was crowded. Sena (UBT) MLA Ambadas Danve was there, along with former MLAs Hitendra Thakur and Kapil Patil, Congress district president Satyam Thakur, and State Congress general secretaries Brij Kishor Dutt, Manish Ganore and Dhananjay Shinde. Thousands of villagers filled the ground around them.

Devendra Tandel, a leader of the fishing community, said the villagers have decided to harden their stand.

Maharashtra Congress president Harshavardhan Sapkal said the port does nothing for the State and puts the livelihoods of local farmers and fishermen at risk. He accused the Union government of caring less about Palghar than about “promoting an industrial house”, and said that was why the project was being pushed. The villagers’ fight, he said, would not stop until the port is scrapped, and the Congress would stand with them. He ended with a sharp, indirect dig at the Prime Minister. [Add the BJP’s or the State government’s response here.]

Under the canopy, the talk is different. The women do not mention parties. They talk about boats, soil and water.

A quick map for readers who have never been there. Vadhavan is a coastal stretch in Dahanu taluka, about 140 km north of Mumbai and near the Gujarat border. Dahanu is protected as an ecologically sensitive area. Its farms, forests and fishing villages have long been treated with care by regulators.

The plan is huge. Project documents, as quoted by the protesting groups, speak of pushing the sea back to create about 1,448 hectares of new land, a breakwater more than 10 km long, heavy dredging, new roads and rail lines, warehousing, and industrial and commercial development on top. The government puts the cost at ₹76,220 crore. The Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority and the Maharashtra Maritime Board are the partners behind it.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has said in public that the port will change the State’s economy, make Palghar a ‘Fourth Mumbai’ and bring lakhs of jobs.

The Vadhavan Bandar Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti, which leads the local fight, reads those promises as a warning. Its slogan leaves no room for doubt: “We do not want a Fourth Mumbai.”

Government studies, the Samiti points out, count 16 fishing villages in the project area. They hold 5,333 households and 20,809 fisherfolk, for whom the sea is the main source of income.

A skills course or a compensation cheque of a few lakh rupees will not give a fisher a new life, the Samiti says. It wants the local catch, including lobster, and the trade around it to be protected. It also wants clear answers on what dredging, reclamation and a long breakwater will do to currents, silt, fishing grounds and the tidal ecosystem.

One question sits under all the others. The Samiti asks whether anyone has properly recorded what the local people know about this sea, what they have seen of it over generations, and what lives in it.

Fishing villages are not the only ones in the way. Roads and railway lines to the port will need land, and official information suggests that this includes private holdings, Adivasi land, forest and government land. The effects will therefore reach well past the shore.

Then there is the question of where the fill for the sea will come from. Protesters fear hills will be quarried, forests cut and Adivasi areas disturbed. Planting trees in a different district, they argue, does nothing for the forest that was lost. They also warn that if mangroves are damaged, the marine life they shelter may not come back, since such habitats are very hard to rebuild.

For Adivasi families, they say, a field worked for generations is what keeps them alive. They want the effects of JNPT and other ports looked at first, covering traffic, pollution, urban sprawl and what happened to local fishing. Only then, they say, should an independent assessment of Vadhavan decide whether to go ahead.

The objections are not only about feeling. The protesters point to three specific gaps.

The first is the kind of port it is. Calling it a ‘container port’ is misleading, they say. Official papers describe a deep-draft port that can also handle bulk chemicals and crude oil. Under the Central Pollution Control Board’s rules, ports, jetties and dredging fall in the Red Category, while ports that handle only containers are rated Orange.

The second is the depth. Government documents say the water is 20 metres deep. The Samiti says its own readings at low tide came out lower.

The third is the public hearing. The depth was raised there, activists say, and nobody gave them a proper reply.

Sanjay Bhalerao, 56, has brought his family along. His parents and children are as opposed to the port as he is. It will hurt fishermen and everyone else who earns a living along this coast, he says. “Our fisheries will be down. Our sustainability will be down. This port won’t help us at all.”

Maharashtra is already in the grip of drought, he adds, and he puts the number of affected talukas at 256. More ports and industry, he says, will only make the climate worse. “They are taking our land and making us a marginalised community. Where will we go? Do they want us to go to U.P. and Bihar? We are Maharashtrians. Why is a Marathi government against us?”

Kartik Desai, one of the younger protesters, thinks the port will harm the seabed. “This is not sustainable development. This is not even development,” he says. With the earth heating up, he fears the area’s trees and mangroves will suffer, and villages could flood. The port itself will be fine, he says, with its machines and equipment. “But the one who will suffer is the common man.”

The jobs on offer leave him cold. About 1.5 lakh people live in the surrounding talukas, he says, and they manage well enough on their own. “We don’t need job opportunities from this kind of industrialisation.”

The official case is built on size. The Union Cabinet cleared a major port at Vadhavan in June 2024. The State leadership describes it as a growth engine that will bring in investment, cargo and work for Palghar and for Maharashtra.

The project has also moved forward on the ground. According to a report quoting the district administration, 124 landowners in Varor agreed in August to give up their land, which eased a survey dispute that had stalled the work. Friday’s protest took place in that same village.

The protesters keep coming back to the same worry. Foreign port, terminal, logistics and dredging companies are also part of the project, and they ask who will count the cost for the families who have lived off this coast for generations.

The speeches carry on under the canopy. The red flags go up and down with them, and the women stay where they are.

Bhalerao has his own way of putting the demand. “This is not the land of other people. This is the land of Shivaji Maharaj, and we will protect it till our last breath.”

Devkar has had her say. She turns to look at the fields past the tent. They are still green.

India / Maharashtra / politics / government