Maha Reclaims Fort Sold for ₹300 in 60s

As a child, Deepak Vaidya had heard tales of an abandoned fort on a sea-facing hillock in Chiplun, in coastal Maharashtra, and went in search of this forgotten wonder.

- Anamika Gharat

THANE: What he saw as an eight-year-old took his breath away. Surrounded by dense jungle and with no proper road, he walked right up to the fort and was transfixed by its deep trench, crumbling turrets and a step-well that magically still held water.

A resident of Anjanvel village, which holds the haunting remains of this Maratha fort, Vaidya returned as a young man, hoping to rekindle the feeling he had experienced as a child. What he saw took his breath away, once more. This time, he was confronted by a sign that read, 'Simran Mango Farm'.

Vaidya, then a local journalist who has since become a priest, teamed up with Akshay Pawar, a fellow native of Anjanvel who lives in Kalyan near Mumbai. Together, they launched a campaign that lasted almost two decades, one that saw Gopalgad Fort transition from private ownership to the state government.

When Vaidya and Pawar began to dig into revenue records, they discovered a shocking blunder that had gone largely unnoticed for decades — while an 1872 land survey had recorded the structure as 'Gopalgarh Fort', a 1960 entry had falsely listed the seven-acre property as barren land. As a result, in the 1960s, the property was auctioned for ₹300 to an Anjanvel resident, Hussain Maniyar, who developed the historic site into a mango farm.