Sharad Pawar gives his support for revival of Nanar project: Raj Thackeray

The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray has urged the state Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray to consider for the revival of the refinery project at Nanar in Ratnagiri.

The project was scrapped by the previous Fadnavis government in 2019 after all political parties other than the Bharatiya Janata Party opposed it.

Raj Thackeray also said that Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawar has supported his demand for reviving the stalled refinery at coastal Nanar village in Ratnagiri district. As there is a serious contest among states to snatch projects away from Maharashtra.

In a four-page letter to the Uddhav Thackeray, the MNS supremo stated that Maharashtra should not let go of the Ratnagiri Rajapur refinery project. This is a massive project of nearly INR 3 lakh crores. The state surely cannot afford to lose this project to another state. He mentioned this while referring to (without naming) American electric vehicle giant Tesla opting to set-up its office at Bengaluru and not Mumbai.

Now, times have changed and the situation demands a radical and progressive approach. The present situation is such that Maharashtra cannot afford to let go of any new project or a project that can bring in foreign investment. If we let this happen, we will lose our status of being a pioneer state in the industrial growth of our country, he added.

Moreover, owing to the pandemic-ensued lockdown, lakhs of Maharashtrian youth have lost their jobs and the project can provide a much-needed boost in the employment sector, Thackeray wrote.

Soon after this, several Sena leaders slammed Raj for retracting from his strong opposition to the Nanar refinery. The video clips of Raj declaring that he would never allow the project to happen at Nanar have been doing the rounds on social media.

The then state government initiated the process of the land survey when it was shelved suddenly before the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 over “environmental concerns” expressed by the Shiv Sena. The Sena, in fact, made it a condition of its pre-poll alliance with the BJP ahead of the election. Moreover, the locals had also opposed the project.

In January 2019, the previous government notified 19,000 hectares of land in Raigad as an integrated industrial cluster. In September 2019, Fadnavis once again said the state government was keen on building Asia’s biggest and first green oil refinery in Konkan.