Farmers across Morbi district took out a large procession to the district Collector’s office on July 15, marking the third phase of a “Satyagraha” movement against a state compensation policy for a high-voltage power line being built across their agricultural land. Thousands of farmers and women walked from Mehendranagar Chowki and submitted a formal petition demanding revisions to a July 4 government resolution, according to Gujarat Samachar.
What the dispute is over
The line at the centre of the protest is a 765 kV, 246-km transmission corridor being built by Halvad Transmission Ltd, a special-purpose vehicle of Adani Energy Solutions, connecting a pooling station at Khavda in Kutch to a switching station at Halvad in Morbi, per National Herald. The route runs through close to 400 villages across Kutch and Morbi, and farmers say the towers permanently take land out of cultivation while compensation has been calculated using the government’s jantri (circle) rate rather than actual market value, which in many of these villages runs well above the official rate.
After more than three weeks of protests in Jetpar village in early June, the state government agreed to a key concession: compensation based on double the market price of the land rather than the jantri rate, and it formed a Market Rate Committee that includes farmer representatives to fix those values. That looked like a resolution at the time. It was not.
Why the protest resumed
The Energy and Petrochemicals Department’s July 4 circular, meant to formalise the June concessions, instead became the new flashpoint. Farmers’ committees say the circular offers 200% compensation on land value plus 30% for rural areas, but falls short of full compensation under Section 10(D) of the Telegraph Act, which they argue is the correct legal standard for this kind of land-use restriction. They are also demanding that no further pole-erection work proceed until compensation is guaranteed under the revised terms, and that farmer representatives get a real seat in the rate-setting process rather than a symbolic one.
What it means for Gujarat’s land-use conflicts
This case sits at the intersection of two things Gujarat is scaling up fast: renewable energy transmission infrastructure out of Kutch’s massive solar and wind hub, and private infrastructure developers acquiring rights-of-way across farmland at a pace that compensation frameworks have not kept up with. The Morbi dispute is one of several land-compensation standoffs tied to transmission and industrial corridors across the state in recent years, and how it resolves will likely set an informal benchmark for compensation demands on future lines, including further stretches of the Khavda green-energy evacuation network that Gujarat still needs to build.
For residents of the affected villages, the immediate stakes are concrete: whether their fields keep producing income once towers and lines are fixed overhead, and whether the payment they eventually receive reflects what the land is actually worth to them rather than an outdated official valuation.
Outlook
The Collector has forwarded the farmers’ latest petition to state authorities, but no date has been set for a further government response. With pole-erection work reportedly contingent on compensation being settled first, the pace of this dispute will directly affect how quickly Halvad Transmission Ltd can complete a line that Gujarat’s broader renewable energy targets depend on.
Sources: Gujarat Samachar, National Herald
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.