MANESAR: Sixty-nine-year-old Rameshawar Yadav recalls the day that changed his entire life and the lives of many generations to come in his family.“It was August 27, 2007, when I sold five acres of our ancestral property to a real estate developer,” he says.Surprisingly, the land was registered in the name of a real estate company around 11pm that day, though technically the tehsil office only functions till 5pm.“If I had not sold my land to the developer that day, it would have gone to the Haryana government as it had already issued notices for acquisition. The state government was paying Rs 2.5 lakh per acre as opposed to the developers who were offering somewhere between Rs 20 lakh and Rs 30 lakh, while the market rate was much much higher,” says Yadav.But later, it turned out that the whole land acquisition process “was to facilitate realtors acquire land at cheaper rates” and “the government was fully involved in looting the farmers”, he adds.Yadav is one of the hundreds of farmers of Manesar and adjoining villages in Gurgaon district who sold their land to various developers at rates much lower than the market price. He is also one of the litigants in an ongoing case in the Supreme Court.Their main allegations in the case are that hundreds of acres acquired from innocent farmers at lower rates for “public purpose” was ultimately licensed to real estate companies.“As soon as the government issued the notification for the acquisition of the land, the developers started visiting the villages asking us to sell our land. They brainwashed us, saying that if we didn’t sell the land to them, we would lose it to the government at much lower rates. And when that didn’t work, they started influencing the younger folk in the family,” claims Surat Singh Numberdar from Manesar village.It was in the same land acquisition scam case that the CBI recently submitted a chargesheet against former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda , some bureaucrats who worked with him in his CM office, some real estate companies and few officials of the department of town and country planning in Haryana.According to the chargesheet, these people conspired to cause a loss of around Rs 1,500 crore to farmers of four villages — Manesar, Nakhdola, Naurangpur and Rampur. And the accused have been booked for cheating, forgery and under the Prevention of Corruption Act.While Yadav says he still owns some land, others say they lost their livelihood. “We had around two acres of land split between five brothers and that too was taken away, leaving us with a very few options for our livelihood. That land was our source of livelihood as we reared cattle and farmed on it,” says Gajraj, another landowner from Nakhdola.While these farmers were still comprehending that they were duped and thinking over their course of action, their next generation grew up and many of them are now umemployed. “A lot of people work as labourers since there are no jobs, the industries in Manesar do not hire locals,” says Dayachand from Manesar.Naresh Yadav from Rampur village adds, “The villages have been robbed of prosperity and the future of their younger generations even as the developers made huge margins and flourished. Many people think that we sold our land for money, but if we wanted money, we would have sold it long ago. That land was not just our livelihood, it was also our life.”In 2007, the Hooda government acquired 912 acres of land from the four villages near IMT Manesar. But the land was released later in the same month. The initial notification for land acquisition was issued in 2004 and between then and the final acquisition orders in 2007, hundreds of land owners lived with the ‘axe of land acquisition’ hanging over their heads.

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