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Protests Over Land Mount Against Ahmedabad-Dholera Expressway

Protests Over Land Mount Against Ahmedabad-Dholera Expressway

A bird’s-eye view of the Dholera Smart City Convention Center. Photo: DICDL


  • Unwilling to part with their land, landowning peasants in 22 villages in Gujarat have forged an alliance against the Dholera Special Investment Region project.
  • The ‘region project covers 920 sq. km – 340 sq. km falls under the coastal regulation zone. The remaining project area is home to a predominantly agrarian population.
  • The NHAI has claimed that the Special Investment Region authority legally transferred the land to it, and the authority has claimed it has released public notices to this effect.
  • Locals have said however that the authority didn’t enumerate any survey numbers and land title changes and that the village revenue records still show their names.
  • The Special Investment Region authority has also promoted the nearby Velavadar Blackbuck sanctuary as an eco-tourist zone.

On October 20, 2021, a phalanx of over a hundred police officers descended unannounced upon the fields of Sarasla village in Ahmedabad district in Gujarat. They were called in by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), to allow their contractor’s earthmoving machines to work for the new 110-km Ahmedabad-Dholera express highway, under the Centre’s ‘Bharat Mala Pariyojana’.

The local residents had been preparing their fields for the winter crop. They were caught off guard by the machines now digging up their fields and intimidated into silence by the police. Over the next few days, 22 villages in the Dholera Special Investment Region, alternatively called the ‘Dholera Smart City’, witnessed similar events.

As the last village of the Dholera project, Bavaliyari, some 71 km from Sarasla, was dug up, the residents became more militant and forced the machines to stop with a sit-in, and challenged the right of the local state authorities to acquire their land and courted arrest. They followed up their protest with a police complaint, meetings with the district authorities and a flurry of organised activities across the 22 villages.

Dholera – one of these villages – has been developed as part of the southwest end of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, along the gulf of Khambhat of the Arabian sea. The ‘region project covers 920 sq. km – 340 sq. km falls under the coastal regulation zone. The remaining project area is home to a predominantly agrarian population. Along with the coveted bhaliya variety of wheat, farmers here typically grow cotton, cumin, jowar (sorghum) and seasonal vegetables, and many locals are also part of milch cooperatives. The region is rain-fed, but also falls within the original canal command area of the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river.

Unwilling to part with their land for the project, landowning peasants across the 22 villages have forged alliances across caste and community to form the ‘Bhal Bachao Samiti’. Over the years, the samiti has mobilised a variety of protest actions against the project, including sit-ins, foot marches, rallies, petitions, appeals through village panchayat resolutions and also a legal challenge to the constitutional validity of the Special Investment Region law in the Gujarat high court.

Sarasla village fields dug up for parallel roadside markings by NHAI. Photo: Preeti Sampat, November 2021

The agitation gathered steam from 2010 to 2015, with residents also courting arrest and refusing to allow project officials entry into the villages. In 2015, the high court issued stayed work on the project and ordered that status quo be maintained on acquiring agricultural land in the area.

According to the initial project development plan, land was to be pooled with landowners’ consent. Having failed to consensually consolidate land, however, project authorities initiated an ‘infrastructure activation zone’ of about 21 sq. km around Dholera village on ‘wasteland’ mostly already under state possession. The Special Investment Region authority set up the ‘Dholera Industrial City Development Limited’ (DICDL) as a special purpose vehicle with 50% state and Central equity in the form of land and funds respectively.

Then, in a clear reversal from the government’s fairly public policy claims of land pooling in the early years of the project, the DICDL claimed that land for Dholera is being consolidated under the state’s town-planning law, which does not require landowners’ consent.

The official transfer of land outside the activation zone by the Special Investment Region authority to the NHAI, and the latter’s subsequent marking of the road through fields, became a critical turning point in the life of the project.

Since this episode, the samiti has intensified efforts to mobilise residents against the project once again. In addition to sit-ins, police complaints and petitions to the district administration, several public meetings have been held in various villages. The petitioners in the high court case have pressed contempt charges against the state, the Dholera Special Investment Region and highway authorities, claiming violation of the 2015 court order mandating status quo on agricultural land.

The NHAI has claimed that the Special Investment Region authority legally transferred the land to it, and the authority has claimed it has released public notices to this effect. The local residents said however that the authority didn’t enumerate any survey numbers and land title changes and that the village revenue records still show their names. They also challenged the veracity of official claims.

The court subsequently sent notices to the state and to the Special Investment Region authority, just as the third COVID-19 wave interrupted further proceedings.

The agitation against the project is once again gathering steam now.

There has also been little private investment on the ground in Dholera. State-level bureaucrats in charge of facilitating the development of Dholera have said that investors “will come only when there is something on the ground”. But in the activation zone, contracts have been awarded for a common effluent treatment plant, a sewage treatment plant and a water treatment plant.

A Tata Chemicals project to manufacture lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles is in the offing over 126 acres, but the company hasn’t announced any details about when the plant might become operational.

To add to the mix, in 2018, the Dholera Special Investment Region authority received approval from the state’s Coastal Zone Management Authority for the development of a 5,000-MW solar park and a 200-MW wind-power project along 110 sq. km of Dolhera’s coastal land. In early 2019, the Union environment ministry approved the first phase of a 1,000-MW solar project, overlooking its impact on the marshy and estuarine habitats of several local and migratory bird species.

Marsh land from across the Dholera convention centre. Photo: Preeti Sampat, November 2021

When the state invited bids for solar power generation in the first phase of the project in March 2020, however, there were no takers.

In addition, the Special Investment Region authority has promoted the nearby Velavadar Blackbuck sanctuary as an eco-tourist zone. Blackbucks are protected under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 – the highest level of protection in Indian law. The environment ministry’s 2019 approval letter for the first phase of the solar project was based on documents submitted by the authority, and noted:

“There are no eco-sensitive areas within 2-3 kilometres of the site. The nearest eco-sensitive site of Velvadar [sic] blackbuck sanctuary is about 4 kilometers south-west from the nearest solar plot planned.”

There are several key stakeholders in the struggle for land in Dholera: the local peasants and residents, the DICDL, the Dholera Special Investment Region authority (representing the Gujarat government), the Centre (through its equity in DICDL), the NHAI, and private capital and developers. State authorities, including the police and district officials, and the Gujarat High Court, have mediated this struggle.

Moreover, the blackbucks of Velavadar, bird species depending on the coastal zone, cattle reared by local pastoralists, land, soil, water and their several conjoined affordances, including the estuaries and marshes of the region, indicate the stakes are more than human. What might they have to say about the Centre’s ‘capex mahotsav’ and ‘Gati Shakti’ Union budget for 2022-2023?

Preeti Sampat teaches sociology at Ambedkar University Delhi.

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