For most of her life, 65-year-old Neema Bai Veena Savde tilled her ancestral land in Bodhare, a quiet village on the western plains of India’s Maharashtra state. She grew bajra (pearl millet) and shenga (groundnut) in the fertile soil, working alongside her family through long, dry summers. She relied on the harvest both for income and daily food. The land, she says, sustained her household for decades.

In 2018, the village head, Gulab Bhau, arrived at her doorstep with what seemed like an opportunity. He told her that a solar company would purchase her farmland, which amounted to about 17 acres, for 1.2 million rupees (about US $13,000). She was handed a check for 350,000 rupees ($3,850) as the first instalment, and told to wait for the rest of the payment. Seven years later, it still hasn’t come. Now, she works as a daily-wage laborer in neighboring states, earning barely enough to survive.

“They said the next instalment would come soon,” Neema Bai recalls. “I’m still waiting.”

Neema Bai’s story is not unique. She belongs to the Gor Banjara tribe, an Indigenous farming community that has lived off this land for several generations. The solar revolution, touted as India’s path to clean energy and rural development, has instead brought dispossession and debt to her community in Bodhare, she says, as well as to four other villages with Indigenous farming communities in western Maharashtra’s Jalgaon district.…

The solar industry has also taken an ecological toll on the surrounding land, including on an important wildlife sanctuary nearby.

Neema Bai and several other farmers say they never fully understood the documents they were asked to sign while selling their land. Today, they are pushing back, demanding the return of land they say was taken from them without informed consent.

Journalist Naila Khan reports from Maharashtra on the growing local resistance to solar development in the region.

Photo by Naila Khan

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