Some senior government officials also kept raising different objections and were not cooperative. They voiced a concern that this was a privately owned company and therefore should not have the same benefits offered to a government company like MIDC. These officials sounded alarm that if it happened, Government would be saddled with many Public Interest Litigations. Clean title of the land was the crux of the entire acquisition, both at the time of payment of compensation to farmers and ultimate transfer/lease of land to the industrial user. If every owner of the land would not get compensation/equity/debentures of Bhama, there would be disputes. If a clean title of land was not available, industrial user also would not be interested in view of the future disputes. As a consequence, financiers started backing off. Sadly, the wonderful idea behind Bhama Construction Company had to be abandoned. Joshi did not get the first mover advantage, but others learned from these difficulties. Projects similar to Shivar Agro and Bhama Construction were later developed by others. For instance, marketing companies like Reliance Fresh or farmers coming together to develop their land collectively like the Magarpatta project in Pune. Those projects were somehow very successful by getting help to solve land acquisition issues and were of much smaller scale. But the ones initiated by Joshi did not take off. Joshi was a pioneer in developing those concepts but failed in execution. Joshi was upset by this failure and it affected his health as well. Later Joshi wrote, ‘I propagated the philosophy of free economy through Shetkari Sanghatana and also through Swatantra Bharat Paksh; but I did not succeed in building and running any autonomous organization in that atmosphere of free economy.” (Angarmala, page 92) 302
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Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage
