What Dholera actually is
Dholera SIR is India’s first Special Investment Region — a planned city built from a blank canvas rather than grown organically around an old town. It is being developed by the Dholera Industrial City Development Limited (DICDL), a joint venture of the Gujarat government and its industrial development bodies, as the Gujarat anchor of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor.
Dholera at a glance
- Region type
- Special Investment Region (SIR), under Gujarat SIR Act 2009
- Total area
- ≈ 920 sq. km across 22 villages
- Parent framework
- Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC)
- Activation Area
- ≈ 22.5 sq. km, first zone with ready infrastructure
- Nearest metro city
- Ahmedabad, ≈ 100 km via expressway
How the land itself is organised
Rather than developing every village at once, the government pools land village by village into Town Planning (TP) schemes. Original landowners get back a reconstituted, road-facing plot in exchange for a portion set aside for public infrastructure — roads, drains, parks and utilities. Once a TP scheme is finalised, those plots can be bought, sold or developed with a clear, government-recorded title.
This is the structural reason Dholera differs from most “investment townships” advertised around Indian cities: the layout, the roads and the civic services are being built by the state government before private construction begins at scale, not promised after enough plots are sold.
Who is actually building it
Infrastructure works — roads, drainage, the water treatment and power network in the Activation Area — are executed through DICDL and Gujarat state agencies, with funding and technical support from national programmes under DMIC. Private developers and investors then build on top of that base infrastructure, sector by sector, as each TP scheme is activated.