How Dholera was planned
Dholera was planned as a greenfield industrial smart city under the Gujarat Special Investment Region Act, 2009, and developed as a node of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor. The master-plan concept is widely attributed to the UK firm Halcrow, with detailed planning by a local counsel. The plan covers about 920 sq km, of which roughly 422 sq km is urban, built in phases over about 30 years, and its history includes real land-acquisition disputes and delays.
The legal and policy foundation
Dholera's planning rests on a specific legal base: the Gujarat Special Investment Region Act, 2009, under which the region was notified as a Special Investment Region, or SIR, with its own planning and development authority. The full name is the Dholera Special Investment Region, though it is marketed as Dholera Smart City. The Act allowed the state to designate a large industrial area and to create a statutory authority, DSIRDA, the Dholera Special Investment Region Development Authority, to plan and manage the land. Dholera was then positioned as a node of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor, a national industrial programme, and is often described as its largest node, a superlative that comes from promotional and reported sources rather than a single primary confirmation. The policy intent was to build a manufacturing and logistics city from open land, anchored to the corridor and to a dedicated freight railway, so that industry would have serviced land, connectivity and single-window governance in one place. The Special Investment Region model was Gujarat's attempt to create large, industry-focused zones with streamlined governance, and Dholera was intended as its flagship demonstration. Reading the project through this legal lens explains why so much emphasis falls on the development authority, the town planning schemes and single-window clearance rather than on conventional municipal structures, and why the city is governed as a development region long before it becomes an ordinary town.
Who drew the master plan
The overall master-plan concept for Dholera is widely attributed to Halcrow, a UK engineering and planning firm, with the detailed planning carried out by a local counsel. This attribution is reported rather than primary-confirmed, so it is stated here as the commonly cited account and not as an established fact. What the plan produced is more important than the credit: a structured city organised around a road spine, a set of land-use zones, reserved corridors for transit, freight and utilities, and a phased build sequence. The land itself is flat, low-lying Bhal coastal terrain on the western shore of the Gulf of Khambhat, about 100 km southwest of Ahmedabad, in Dholera taluka. That setting shaped the plan, because roughly a third of the developable land falls in the Coastal Regulation Zone and drainage and flooding are documented constraints that the water and stormwater design had to answer. Whoever drew it, the plan's defining choices, a road spine, reserved corridors, zoned industrial and urban land, and a phased sequence, are what a reader can actually see in the built Activation Area today, which makes the design legible on the ground rather than only on paper.
The numbers behind the plan
The planning envelope is about 920 sq km, of which roughly 580 sq km is treated as developable and about 422 sq km is set aside for urban development. The city is being built through six Town Planning schemes, TP1 to TP6, all of whose draft schemes have been sanctioned. Phase-I combines TP1, about 51 sq km, and TP2, about 102 sq km, for roughly 153 sq km, with TP2 holding the Activation Area and the ABCD administrative building. Reported later phasing groups TP3 and TP4 at about 126 sq km and TP5 and TP6 at about 142 sq km, which together with Phase-I sums to about 421 to 422 sq km. The zoning defines industrial, residential, City Centre, Knowledge and IT, Logistics, Green Belt, Coastal Regulation Zone and other categories, with total industrial land of about 11,000 hectares. Exact per-zone percentages are not reliably sourced, so this page states zone types and known totals rather than inventing shares. These figures are best held as a planning framework rather than as fixed quantities, because several of them, including the exact developable split and the per-scheme areas, are reported rather than drawn from a single reachable primary document. Where a number is uncertain, this account flags it instead of presenting a false precision, which matters for a plan of this scale and age.
The phased timeline and its governance
The plan is structured as three phases over roughly 30 years. Phase 1, reported around 2020 to 2025, centred on the Activation Area. Phase 2, around 2025 to 2030, was to add the airport and industry. Phase 3, around 2030 to 2040 or 2042, envisions the full 920 sq km with a promotional target of about one million residents and more than 800,000 jobs. The end year is stated inconsistently as 2040 or 2042 and is treated here as reported. Governance is layered: DSIRDA is the statutory planning and land authority, while the city is built by DICDL, the Dholera Industrial City Development Limited, a special purpose vehicle incorporated on 28 January 2016 and owned 51 percent by the Gujarat government through DSIRDA and 49 percent by the central government through the NICDC Trust. NICDC, formerly DMICDC, is the central nodal agency for the corridor. This split ownership is meant to keep both state and central backing behind the project. The dual ownership also means that a change of government at either the state or central level need not by itself halt the project, because both tiers hold a formal stake. In practice, though, sustained budgetary support and administrative attention over decades matter more than the ownership chart, and those are exactly the variables that determine whether a phased plan of this length is actually delivered.
Disputes, delays and an honest reading
A fair account of how Dholera was planned includes its difficulties. Land acquisition was litigated: the Gujarat High Court stayed SIR acquisition in 2015 after farmer petitions, and a 2017 Business Standard report found that only about 290 of more than 900 sq km had then been secured. The wider corridor also moved slowly, with the same publication describing the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor in 2017 as a tale of abandonments and delays. Key dates should be cited specifically rather than blended, including the 2009 SIR Act and the announcement era around 2013. The land-pooling Town Planning approach was part of the answer to acquisition friction, since it returns serviced plots to owners rather than buying every parcel outright. The honest conclusion is that Dholera was planned ambitiously and on a sound legal footing, that real anchors such as the Tata semiconductor fab and about 300 MW of solar now exist, and that the city remains a long, phased build whose promotional end-state targets should not be read as achievements. For a reader, the fair way to hold all of this is to treat the master plan as a serious and legally grounded design, to acknowledge the genuine difficulties of acquisition and pace, and to judge progress by dated milestones rather than by the vision. The planning of Dholera is real and considered; its delivery is a long, contested process that is still unfolding, and honesty about both halves is what an independent reference owes its readers.
FAQ
When was Dholera planned?
Its legal foundation is the Gujarat Special Investment Region Act, 2009, with the project announced and pushed through the early 2010s. The development authority DSIRDA plans the region, and the building SPV, DICDL, was incorporated on 28 January 2016.
Who designed Dholera's master plan?
The master-plan concept is widely attributed to the UK firm Halcrow, with detailed planning by a local counsel. This is a reported attribution rather than a primary-confirmed fact.
Was there opposition to the plan?
Yes. Land acquisition was litigated, and the Gujarat High Court stayed SIR acquisition in 2015 after farmer petitions. A 2017 report found only about 290 of more than 900 sq km secured at that time, and the wider corridor faced documented delays.