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What the rules do to land in Dholera
If you own land in Dholera, or you are being sold some, the thing that decides what can be built on it is a government document, not the price. This site reads those documents and tells you what they say, in ordinary words.
In 2009 the Gujarat government drew a line around twenty two villages south of Ahmedabad and called the land inside it the Dholera Special Investment Region. A notification is simply the government order that does this, printed in the state gazette.
Inside that line, land is being reorganised through town planning schemes. A town planning scheme takes everyone's fields in one area, keeps part of the land for roads, parks, schools and land the authority can sell, and gives each owner back a smaller, regular plot in roughly the same place. Nobody is bought out. Everybody gives up a share.
So the question that matters for a piece of land here is not what it costs. It is which scheme it sits in, what stage that scheme has reached, and how much of it the scheme takes. This site answers those three questions from the government's own documents, and prints the questions the documents do not answer.
Nobody buys your land. A share of it is taken
This is the part most people get wrong, so it is worth being exact about it. A town planning scheme is not land acquisition. The government does not buy the field and pay compensation for it. Instead the boundaries of every field in the scheme area are redrawn together, a percentage of the land is kept back for public use, and each owner receives a new plot carved out of what remains.
The plot you had before the scheme is called the original plot. The plot you are given back is called the final plot. It is smaller, it is a more regular shape, and the Act says it should be as close as possible to where the original plot was.
The Development Plan for Dholera states the mechanism in one paragraph.
Under the Town Planning (TP) Schemes land is not acquired by the Government agency. It is reshaped, readjusted and returned to the original owner. Generally when a Town Planning Scheme is laid in an area, a certain per cent of land is deducted from original plot and utilised in providing common infrastructure and facilities like roads, gardens, play grounds etc. Land parcels retained by the authority are then used for 'public purposes'.
dp_report1.pdf, p.182, Section 10.5 The Proposed Strategy for DSIR, OFFICIAL
How large that share is, and what the documents actually promise about it, is set out on the deduction page. What the different classes of land are called, and which ones these documents never define at all, is on the land classes page.
The eight schemes, and how far each has got
The 2012 Development Plan cuts the region into six numbered town planning schemes. Two more sheets exist, marked 2/A and 4/A, signed in their own right. No document we hold says how those two relate to schemes 2 and 4, so this site keeps eight separate records and does not guess at a relationship.
The stage column matters more than the area column. A draft scheme is a proposal. A preliminary scheme has been sanctioned and can be acted on. Until a scheme is sanctioned, the plot boundaries in it are not settled.
| Scheme | Stage | Area, sq km | Part villages | Government order |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scheme 1 | draft | 51.40 | 4 | SIRAA/03/2012/566-A |
| Scheme 2 | no stage stated | 102.34 | no list supplied | none supplied |
| Scheme 2/A | preliminary | not in the TP table | 4 | none supplied |
| Scheme 3 | sanctioned draft | 66.60 | 8 | SIRAA/06/2013/439 |
| Scheme 4 | no stage stated | 60.00 | no list supplied | none supplied |
| Scheme 4/A | preliminary | not in the TP table | 2 | none supplied |
| Scheme 5 | no stage stated | 74.75 | no list supplied | none supplied |
| Scheme 6 | no stage stated | 67.33 | no list supplied | none supplied |
The full record for each scheme, including who signed it and what the sheet warns you about, is at the scheme register. If you want the order the stages happen in, read who signs off a scheme.
The twenty two villages, and how uneven they are
The 2009 order does not draw a circle on a map. It lists twenty two named revenue villages and says the land of those villages is now the region. So the first useful question about any plot here is simply which of those villages it is in.
They are nothing like the same size. Bavaliyari covers 111.2724 sq km. Bhimtalav covers 7.4042 sq km, which is smaller by a factor of more than twenty.
Each village has its own page in the village register, showing which schemes name it, how it is spelled on each document, and what the sources do not say about it. Nineteen of the twenty two sat in Dhandhuka taluka and three in Barwala, which is explained on the taluka page.
The fifty per cent everyone quotes, read carefully
You will hear that Dholera landowners give up half their land and keep half. The documents we hold say something narrower than that, and the difference is worth understanding before anyone signs anything.
One sanction, for Draft Town Planning Scheme No. 3, tells the Town Planning Officer to keep the deduction at an average of 50 per cent, with a list of named exceptions. An average across a whole scheme is not a promise about any single plot. One plot can lose more than half and another less, and the average still holds.
No document in our set turns that sentence around and states what an owner gets back. That figure is arithmetic somebody else did, not a government commitment, and this site will not print it as though it were one.
The full wording, the exceptions and the separate money charge that is often confused with it are on the deduction page and the betterment page.
Questions this site answers
Each of these pages answers one question and nothing else. If you only read one thing here, read the first.
- 01What do the words on a scheme sheet actually mean?Every term used on these documents, in one sentence of plain English, with the document that carries it.
- 02Who signs off a town planning scheme, and in what order?The stages a scheme passes through, the bodies that sign each one, and the two Dholera sanctions that exist in writing.
- 03My village is in a scheme. Is all of it in?Every scheme sheet says part villages. What that means, and why no document says how much of your village is inside.
- 04What is a survey number, and how many does my village have?The unit the whole record is counted in, and all 14,574 of them across the twenty two villages.
- 05Which land is left out of the deduction?Ponds, grazing land, temples and burial grounds are named as exceptions. One pond is named by its survey number.
- 06Will I be charged money for the rise in my land value?The betterment contribution is a payment, not a share of land. It is capped, and the cap is not the same fifty per cent.
- 07Why is my village spelled differently on every document?The gazette, the planning map and the census disagree on nine of the twenty two names. Here is every spelling, side by side.
- 08Which taluka is my village in?Nineteen villages were in Dhandhuka and three in Barwala in 2009. Dholera taluka, which many listings name, does not exist.
- 09What is actually printed on a scheme drawing?Scale, sheet number, who drew it, and the warning printed on the sheet itself that it must not be used for measurements.
- 10Why do the scheme areas not add up to the region?The six scheme rows and the notified total differ by a large margin. No document explains it, so this page shows the arithmetic.
- 11What happened when?Every date these documents carry, from the 2009 notification to the 2013 sanction, in the order they happened.
How to read anything on this site
Every number shows where it came from
The value, the unit, the date it refers to, and the document and page it was read from. Nothing here is remembered or copied from a listing site.
How this is builtMissing things are shown as missing
Four schemes have no village list, and six have no government order in our documents. Those cells say so. Nothing is filled in by guesswork.
What is missingRules are quoted, never summarised away
Where a rule matters, the exact sentence appears with its Act, its section and its page. If we do not hold the rule, the page says so.
The exact wordingYou can take the data
Both source files, four tables built from them, and the word audit, as JSON and CSV. No sign-up.
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