CHIC DIGS: (From top) Bharat Shah’s house, and two other plush bungalows in Maval. Pictures: Sanjit Kundu

Tukaram knows his land. The farmer stands on a narrow strip of a road near the Pavana dam in Maval, between Pune and Mumbai, and points to the large swathe of lush green land around him. This is where Amitabh Bachchan owned his 22 acres — till he decided to give it all up.

But Tukaram has no quarrel with Bachchan. He looks at two beautiful bungalows with well-manicured lawns. “That one belongs to Chakor Doshi (of Walchandnagar Industries Limited) and the other is (diamond merchant) Pankaj Kothari’s,” he says. “Are they farmers?”

On the foothills of the beautiful hill, Bachchan had acquired his plot of land. But the actor never built his bungalow there. The land was for agriculture, and in Maharashtra you need to be a farmer to buy agricultural land. Bachchan showed land records in Uttar Pradesh to establish his farmer status. But the friendly government of Mulayam Singh Yadav fell, and the new government cancelled the Barabanki land deal. Bachchan, in turn, decided to give up the land which he had bought in the early Nineties.

Bachchan may have withdrawn, but for Tukaram and other farmers in Pune’s Maval region, the takeover of their ancestral land in the Western Ghats of the Sahyadri range is inevitable. Most farmers who live on rain-fed paddy neither curse nor welcome the onset of development and the growth of huge, isolated bungalows marring an otherwise beautiful view. “It has pushed up the land prices. We can command Rs 25 lakhs per acre,” says Tukaram.

This is Bollywood’s favourite weekend getaway. The Western Ghats are a hop, skip and jump away from Mumbai, thanks to a four-lane expressway connecting Mumbai and Pune. It is 128 kms — or just two-and-a-half hours — from Mumbai.

And it is just the right place for a secluded weekend, for the ghats are thick with forests, with wooded hills and mists hanging over them, deep valleys, waterfalls, streams and rivulets. The view is breathtaking, and with two hill stations, Lonavala and Khandala, now almost as busy as the metros, Mumbai and Pune’s rich are flocking to this idyllic locale. Unlike the Bushy and the Valvan dams close to Lonavala, the Pavana dam area is still virgin and green.

But not for long. Farmers are selling their land and celebrities are building imposing bungalows there. Locals say actor Aamir Khan has acquired 11 acres of land and singer Sonu Nigam 10 acres. Cricketer Mohammad Azharuddin and his actress wife Sangeeta Bijlani have also bought a plot there.

Eons ago Tanuja invested in a small bungalow in Lonavala. Among the earlier Hindi film actors to find a place there was Dharmendra on the outskirts of Lonavala in a village called Aundhe.

Today, a hill called Rustic Island, near Lonavala, is dotted with bungalows. It counts among its hallowed inmates members of the Ambani family.

When actor Suneil Shetty recently built his peach-coloured bungalow near Kunenama village in Summer Hill, close to Lonavala, the place was almost deserted. Says Babu, a Lonavala resident, “The only other bungalow in Kunemana was the one that belonged to the Choksis of Asian Paints. For some years it was in a state of neglect. And then it was redone by German engineers who built a sponge-tiled swimming pool. I have been there and you actually feel as if you have stepped on a sponge.”

Shetty’s bungalow, near the sunset point at Kunenama village, sits on the edge of a cliff with a picturesque view of the valley. “It’s like a spaceship,” says Ashok Kadse, deputy conservator of forest, Pune zone. Shetty’s multi-layered bungalow spawned a slew of cottages around the place. Film producer and diamond merchant Bharat Shah has got two houses in and around Lonavala. One of them, a huge glass bungalow built like a water reservoir, is called the Mirage. Soon after he built that, Shah ended up in prison.

Residents say that Jackie Shroff is now building a bungalow there. And Sanjay Dutt was there last month, apparently looking for land.

While Amitabh Bachchan got embroiled in the Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Land Act, 1948, most of the others got the forest department to release land that was originally in a forested area. “The amended Maharashtra Private Forest Act introduced in 1972 was meant to protect places such as the Maval taluka,” says Lonavla-born lawyer Sanjay Wandre.

Wandre says that the rampant construction in and around Lonavala and in Maval taluka has changed the climate of Lonavala. “Earlier we’d never heard of floods here and the forests were so thick that they were completely inaccessible. Now you can go everywhere and in place of trees you see bungalows.”

But for the celebrities, the place is a haven after Mumbai, even though they visit only occasionally, and usually for partying with friends and family.

With celebrities eyeing the area and the spurt in land sales, land scams have become rampant. Middle-men are making money — one enterprising dealer now has a fleet of cars, all with the same numbers. The local crime branch office in Pashan near Pune University is flooded with land grab cases from Maval taluka.

But the farmers — who mostly grow rice, sugarcane, tomato, onion and garlic — remember the time when land was selling for Rs 500 an acre. Today, many of them have sold a part of their land and are cultivating vegetables in the remaining part. Some are looking after the celebrity bungalows, for a salary of Rs 3,000-5,000 a month.

No, the Mavals have no complaints. Their forefathers were the Maratha warriors from the region who fought in the famous battle of Wadgaon in 1779 and defeated the English. The farmers today have no time for war — they have their fields to cultivate and land to sell. The invaders have never had it so good.