Purandar's New Airport Closes Its Land Deal by October 20 — Then What Fills In Around It

By October 10, every farmer across seven villages in Purandar taluka — Vanpuri, Udachiwadi, Kumbharvalan, Ekhatpur, Munjwadi, Khanvadi, and Pargaon — has to decide whether to sign. By October 20, the Maharashtra government wants land acquisition for the Chhatrapati Sambhajiraje International Airport closed, with or without them; MIDC has already warned that compulsory acquisition after the deadline forfeits rehabilitation-policy benefits for anyone who hasn't signed by then.

It's worth sitting with how fast this has moved. The Government Resolution authorizing acquisition of 1,216.75 hectares was only issued on February 9, 2026. A High Power Committee fixed compensation at roughly ₹1.61 crore per acre on April 24. By September, consent had reached 96% and the district administration held physical possession of about 75% of the land, trending toward 80% by month's end. A project that spent the better part of two decades stuck — revived here after the original Chakan alternative collapsed under its own land-acquisition resistance — is now closing in under eight months.

What comes next is less often talked about. Purandar taluka, 45 km southeast of Pune city, has no metro line, no dedicated bus corridor, no rail station anywhere near the site. The only existing links are NH-48 (Pune–Bengaluru), NH-65 (Pune–Hyderabad), and the Mumbai-Pune Expressway — and the connectivity roads meant to actually tie the airport site into them are still on paper, not on the ground. Construction is slated to start this year and run to 2029, which means thousands of construction workers, engineers, and contractors need to get to a site with none of that infrastructure in place, every single day, starting almost immediately.

Chakan MIDC went through a version of this already — a workforce commuting into an industrial belt faster than the roads could keep up, part of why manufacturers there have been eyeing relocation over it. Purandar is starting from an earlier point on that same curve: before the roads, before the bus routes, before anything except a highway junction 45 km away. Shared rides between Pune's residential pockets, Saswad, and Jejuri toward a jobsite with zero transit of its own aren't a convenience here — for the next three years, they're close to the only option that doesn't involve every worker driving in alone on a two-lane highway shoulder.

The land deal closing this month is the part that makes headlines. The commute problem it creates is the part nobody's built yet.