Vadhavan port project faces continued resistance from Palghar villagers

Opposition parties have joined villagers in Palghar who say the ₹76,220-crore Vadhavan port will take their sea, their farms and their futures

Updated - November 05, 2026 10:24 am IST - Varor (Palghar)

The Varor gathering on November 2, 2026, is one stop in a run of protests against the port being built near Dahanu. Fifty-six organisations are part of it | Photo Credit: Chinmay Gaikwad

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.

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.

The damage beyond the water

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.