“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”
- Arthur Conan Doyle

Introduction
India is swiftly creating world-class infrastructure that is aiming to emerge as a global manufacturing hub in the post covid world. The greenfield project of Dholera Special Investment Region (DSIR) is an urban utopia of the 21st century situated 100 km approximately southwest of Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Dholera will be the first smart city along the Delhi–Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) that has been envisioned as “India's most attractive location for manufacturing and industrial development.”^[1].

In this piece, I illustrate a case study that I presented in the first summer school on Land Governance and Development this year at Azim Premji University. In the case study, I try to observe “institutional innovation”[2] such as Land Pooling Policy mechanism used as an approach for land grabbing and empowering private players through public private partnership, bypassing urbanisation with newer legal mechanisms shaped in corporate interest to assembling land and developing physical and social infrastructure.

Dholera Smart City: A new trend of City Building in India

Dholera smart city is a part of the trend of new cities building with rapid industrialisation in neoliberal India. The Gujarat government in middle of 2009 converted 22 villages along the Gulf of Khambhat into the Dholera Special Investment Region (DSIR). The smart city promises exclusive technocratic mode of urbanisation without any annoyances in everyday urban life. The area of 920 km is constituted under the Gujarat Special Investment Region (SIR) Act 2009, and is home to a predominantly agrarian population of 39,300. 

Instituting Dholera: using the modalities of rule of law as a prime tool for taking big bold ideas in urban planning

The case of Dholera reflects a model of enforcing rule of law as the prime tool for pursuing neoliberal urbanism with the assent of private player. The state government uses town planning law for the conversion of rural agrarian land to building smart cities. 

The town planning law, in this case, is the Gujarat Town Planning and Urban Development Act (GTPUDA), 1976 that bypasses national legislation of India’s Land Acquisition Act, by widens the scope of land acquisition for Public Purpose and “defines town planning, development plan or an infrastructure project as also deemed to be land needed for public purpose.”^[3]  The GTPUDA does not include compensation for land taken for public purpose. 

Likewise, the Gujarat Special Investment Region (SIR) Act was enacted in 2009 to widen the scope of land acquisition for ‘Public Purpose’ in greenfield projects such as GIFT & Dholera. The 2009 SIR Act has a policy provision of land pooling policy that bypasses “what the India Infrastructure Report (2009) called ‘land challenge’^[4] of the present Indian land acquisition act.

Under SIR the regional government can acquire any piece of land albeit agricultural land via a land pooling mechanism and then readjust the acquired land by reallocating it to new urban development master plans.  Similar to Gujarat town planning act SIR Act does not include compensation for land taken for ‘public purpose’. 

Hence the SIR act allows the acquisition of land far quicker through land pooling mechanism without having any requirement for eminent domain to acquire land for carrying out planning and development.

Land Pooling: The new phase of urbanisation bypassing involuntary acquisition through voluntary participation

The greenfield project of Dholera Smart City offers a new phase of urbanisation in India that bypasses the existing challenges of land acquisition through policy provision such as the land pooling policy in the Special Investment Region (SIR), enacted for establishing “investment regions and investment areas”^[5]in the regional state. 

The policy provision of land pooling is used for the accumulation of land in Dholera to build new township from the scratch. The massive conversion of agrarian land into a greenfield city is an exercise by regional to shift “the planning paradigm from “involuntary acquisition”[6] to “voluntary participation”[7] nudging land owners to participate in the process of nation building exercise.

The land pooling mechanism is premised on the principle of voluntary participation. A group of landowners are temporarily brought together by a development authority (a state, parastatal or special purpose vehicle) for planning a region’s development. “As there is no ‘acquisition’ or ‘transfer of ownership’, the case for compensation does not arise.”^[8]  Subsequently , a betterment charge is levied by the development authority for the proportion of the land revamped with new infrastructure facilities. The private sector plays an active role in assembling land and developing physical and social infrastructure. 

Conclusion 

The creation of Dholera Special Investment Region is to spearhead economic growth and urbanisation in the region. It reflects a paradigm shift in developmental discourse that is pervasive in the global south towards new city making through public private partnership model and subtly outwit the current challenges of land acquisition act by policy provision of land pooling. 

Dholera smart city emerges as a site of an ‘entrepreneurial urbanisation’ that “prioritises urbanisation as a business model rather than a model of social justice.”^[9] The Town Planning Scheme in Dholera is shaped for corporate interest to control and monitor its population. The SIR law bypasses the present national law of land acquisition and empowers regional state with increasing powers in controlling and directing urbanisation through new legal mechanisms. 

Last, the Dholera Smart City emerges as a site for a new ‘regime of dispossession’ through ongoing land grabs. The regional state uses rule of law as the prime tool for asserting its sovereignty and takes big bold ideas in urban planning and criminalises several aspects of social action and protests against the building of a new industrial town. The increasing use of a rule of law by the state in order to maintain and authorise sovereign power over particular populations and territories excludes those on the margins.

References 

1) Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-colonial Urbanisation by Rajesh Bhattacharya, Kalyan Sanyal
https://www.epw.in/journal/2011/31/review-urban-affairs-review-issues-sp...
 

2) New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in Dholera smart city, Gujarat by Ayona Datta.  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2043820614565748
 

3) Evaluation of Land Pooling Policy in Delhi by Rima Mondal 
https://www.epw.in/journal/2022/10/special-articles/evaluation-land-pool...

4) Eminent Domain and the Right to Land in India by Preeti Sampat
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286979789_Limits_to_absolute_power_Eminent_domain_and_the_right_to_land_in_India
 

5) Dholera: The Emperor’s New City by Preeti Sampat
https://www.epw.in/journal/2016/17/special-articles/dholera.html