Dholera smart city: Gujarat govt uses private agency for processing land acquisition, "violates" High Court ruling

Farmers display their land title in Dholera SIR

By A Representative
In a move which is being interpreted as violation of the High Court ruling, the Gujarat government has begun the work of land acquisition process in the Dholera special investment region (SIR), situated in the south of Ahmedabad district.
On December 10, 2015 the High Court had stayed land acquisition, asking the sate government to maintain status quo. It asked the government “not to proceed with land acquisition or related activities.”
Bringing this to light, the Khedut Samaj – Gujarat (KSG), in a statement, said that the process of land acquisition has “begun with the help of the agencies to which it has outsourced the job of work of land measurement.”
The Gujarat government wants to set up a greenfield smart city in Dholera region by applying the town planning Act on a huge area of about 900 sq km area, on which the SIR has been visualized.
Under the town planning Act, the state government is empowered to take away 40 to 50 per cent of the agricultural land in the name of developing urban infrastructure.
Despite the hype around it, no investor has turned up to invest in Dholera SIR because it is supposed to be a low lying, flood prone area, requiring massive infrastructure investment in order to fill up the land region.
Calling it a direct violation of the court order, the KSG has said that the process of land measurement has “happened thrice already in the last 10 days”, when the agency’s officials “have visited the land, but people have thrown them out of their land.”
Wondering whether the Gujarat government is “hell-bent on disregarding the court orders”, the KSG said, “Can the people be expected to remain patient? It is possible that the state government is deliberately trying to precipitate a crisis under the pretext of crushing the farmers’ agitation.”
KSG said, it seems the Gujarat government is “trying to tell the people, 'I am the monarch of all I survey, it is my right, there is none to dispute. The High Court orders do not bother us, we will do as we wish.”
Calling it a display of “undemocratic and criminal core” of the Gujarat government, the KSG said, this type of attitude is “pushing the state towards anarchy.”
Calling land measurement a “blatant illegality and unconstitutionality on display”, the KSG said, “The 22 villages falling in the proposed Dholera SIR area have been agitating since the last four years. Their peaceful and non-violent struggle has gone unheeded by the Gujarat government.”
“The protests have received the support of Khedut Samaj – Gujarat and Jameen Adhikar Andolan Gujarat. The local farmers and the Khedut Samaj – Gujarat had challenged the DSIR and the SIR Act 2009 (under which Dholera SIR has been declared) through a PIL in the High Court in 2014”, KSG said.

Comments

Was Netaji forced to alter face, die in obscurity in USSR in 1975? Was he so meek?

By Rajiv Shah This should sound almost hilarious. Not only did Subhas Chandra Bose not die in a plane crash in Taipei, nor was he the mysterious Gumnami Baba who reportedly passed away on 16 September 1985 in Ayodhya, but we are now told that he actually died in 1975—date unknown—“in oblivion” somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Which city? Moscow? No one seems to know.

Love letters in a lifelong war: Babusha Kohli’s resistance in verse

By Ravi Ranjan* “War does not determine who is right—only who is left.” Bertrand Russell’s words echo hauntingly in our times, and few contemporary Hindi poets embody this truth as profoundly as Babusha Kohli. Emerging from Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, Kohli has carved a unique space in literature by weaving together tenderness, protest, and philosophy across poetry, prose, and cinema. Her work is not merely artistic expression—it is resistance, refuge, and a call for peace.

Swami Vivekananda's views on caste and sexuality were 'painfully' regressive

By Bhaskar Sur* Swami Vivekananda now belongs more to the modern Hindu mythology than reality. It makes a daunting job to discover the real human being who knew unemployment, humiliation of losing a teaching job for 'incompetence', longed in vain for the bliss of a happy conjugal life only to suffer the consequent frustration.

Asbestos contamination in children’s products highlights global oversight gaps

By A Representative A commentary published by the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat (IBAS) has drawn attention to the challenges governments face in responding effectively to global public-health risks. In an article written by Laurie Kazan-Allen and published on March 5, 2026, the author examines how the discovery of asbestos contamination in children’s play products has raised questions about regulatory oversight and international product safety. The article opens by reflecting on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that governments in several countries were slow to respond to early warning signs of the crisis. Referring to the experience of the United Kingdom, the author writes that delays in implementing protective measures contributed to “232,112 recorded deaths and over a million people suffering from long Covid.” The commentary uses this example to illustrate what it describes as the dangers of underestimating emerging threats. Attention then turns...

Echoes of Vietnam and Chile: The devastating cost of the I-A Axis in Iran

By Ram Puniyani The recent joint military actions by Israel and the United States against Iran have been devastating. Like all wars, this conflict is brutal to its core, leaving a trail of human suffering in its wake. The stated pretext for this aggression—the brutality of the Ayatollah Khamenei regime and its nuclear ambitions—clashes sharply with the reality of the diplomatic landscape. Iran had expressed a willingness to remain at the negotiating table, signaling a readiness to concede points emerging from dialogue.

Buddhist shrines were 'massively destroyed' by Brahmanical rulers: Historian DN Jha

Nalanda mahavihara By Rajiv Shah Prominent historian DN Jha, an expert in India's ancient and medieval past, in his new book , "Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History", in a sharp critique of "Hindutva ideologues", who look at the ancient period of Indian history as "a golden age marked by social harmony, devoid of any religious violence", has said, "Demolition and desecration of rival religious establishments, and the appropriation of their idols, was not uncommon in India before the advent of Islam".

The kitchen as prison: A feminist elegy for domestic slavery

By Garima Srivastava* Kumar Ambuj stands as one of the most incisive voices in contemporary Hindi poetry. His work, stripped of ornamentation, speaks directly to the lived realities of India’s marginalized—women, the rural poor, and those crushed under invisible forms of violence. His celebrated poem “Women Who Cook” (Khānā Banātī Striyāṃ) is not merely about food preparation; it is a searing indictment of patriarchal domestic structures that reduce women’s existence to endless, unpaid labour.

Authoritarian destruction of the public sphere in Ecuador: Trumpism in action?

By Pilar Troya Fernández The situation in Ecuador under Daniel Noboa's government is one of authoritarianism advancing on several fronts simultaneously to consolidate neoliberalism and total submission to the US international agenda. These are not isolated measures, but rather a coordinated strategy that combines job insecurity, the dismantling of the welfare state, unrestricted access to mining, the continuation of oil exploitation without environmental considerations, the centralization of power through the financial suffocation of local governments, and the systematic criminalization of all forms of opposition and popular organization.

The price of silence: Why Modi won’t follow Shastri, appeal for sacrifice

By Arundhati Dhuru, Sandeep Pandey* In 1965, as India grappled with war and a crippling food crisis, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri faced a United States that used wheat shipments under the PL-480 agreement as a lever to dictate Indian foreign policy. Shastri’s response remains legendary: he appealed to the nation to skip one meal a day. Millions of middle-class households complied, choosing temporary hunger over the sacrifice of national dignity. Today, India faces a modern equivalent in the energy sector, yet the leadership’s response stands in stark contrast to that era of self-reliance.

Search This Blog