GHAZIABAD: Indirapuram Extension, once perceived to be the next big real estate destination in Ghaziabad, has been pared down further in size. Envisaged as a township spread over 240 acres in 2004, it was whittled down to 60 acres, and is now going to be only 12 acres.The reason is the Ghaziabad Development Authority’s (GDA) inability to acquire land from local farmers at rates higher than the prevailing circle rate. And the development authority, which has so far managed to acquire 12 acres of land, says now the township will have to be built over this only. The master plan is also going to reflect this, the officials said.Asheesh Shivpuri, chief architect and town planner of GDA, said, “Since 2004 when it was conceived, the Indirapuram extension scheme has been in and out of one problem or the other. The GDA had planned to acquire about 240 acres of land from the villagers in which the township was to come. But even after more than one decade and a half, we have failed to acquire land and kept on downsizing the area.”“The farmers from whom the land was to be acquired were not on the same page over the rates and the matter even lingered in court for some years, forcing us to bring down the land size from 240 acres to 80 acres. Even after that we faced the problem of continuous land and had to again scale down to 60 acres but even that didn’t work out,” he added.The principal region behind the farmers not agreeing to part away with the land was rate issues. “The existing circle rate of the area is Rs 72,000 per sqm, but the farmers have been demanding Rs 1.40 lakh per sqm. It is financially not feasible for the GDA to acquire the required land at such a rate. We had also proposed a land pooling policy but that too failed to cut ice with the farmers,” said Shivpuri.With all options exhausted, the development authority will now develop group housing societies on just 12 acres of land that it has managed to acquire to date, according to the town planner. Sikdar Tyagi, a local resident who owns a patch of land in the area, said, “The land rates in Indirapuram are quite high and in terms of property this is what farmers have got and they would obviously want rates which are compatible with market rates.”