Dholera Smart City will set new standards 6th May 2019 | Source by https://www.newindianexpress.com
Located 80 km from Ahmedabad, Dholera Smart City is envisaged to create 8 lakh employment opportunities and house 20 lakh people by 2042. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has visioned the smart city to be double the size of Delhi.
Proposed to commence operations in September 2019 in an area of 22.5 sq km in the first phase of development, the smart city, according to plans, will extend operations to 920 sq km by 2042.
With a physical footprint larger than that of Singapore, the Dholera Special Investment Region (DSIR) is a part of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, which is committed to transform India’s manufacturing and service base by developing a number of smart, sustainable and industrial cities along the 1,483-km long Delhi-Mumbai corridor.
It is in close proximity to Vadodara, Rajkot, Surat, Bhavnagar and Ahmedabad industrial cities. The DSIR will house world-class infrastructure, a Mass Rapid Transit System connecting it to Ahmedabad with a dedicated international airport and an expressway. The city will offer provisions such as storm water drainage, water supply, sewerage, power, telecommunications and gas through an underground network using smart technology.
NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant opines the key challenge for India is to grow at rates of 8-9 per cent or more annually for three decades to uplift the vast segment of population presently below the poverty line and to grow at rates of 15-16 per cent annually for the next three decades. “Gujarat has taken this opportunity to meet the challenges by developing DSIR,” he says.
The Gujarat government has handed over 1,178.95 hectares of land to the Dholera Industrial City Development Limited (DICDL), a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for the project. The construction of roads and underground utilities are likely to be completed soon with a total investment to the tune of $18,086 million.
Salient features of the DSIR include,, empowered mechanism for administration autonomy in operations, freedom in planning, commitment to adopt best practices, full potential for private sector participation and fully developed environment and framework for PPP (Public-Private Partnership).
The Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation Ltd (DMICDC) has entrusted AECOM, a consulting firm, with the responsibility of implementing all trunk infrastructure proposals, including roads, drainage system, water supply, recycle water, sewerage, power, Information Communications Technology (ICT) and gas.
“Dholera would be India’s first Platinum-Certificate Green City due to its planning design and execution,” says the DMICDC CMD.
The DMICDC has already taken the initiative to invite manufacturers in the field of aviation, defense, electronics, pharmaceuticals, textiles, heavy engineering, etc., to set up shop, offering early-bird incentives, including heavy discounts on land prices and financial grants and waivers.
Dholera will be the largest of the eight industrial smart cities being developed in the first phase of the $100 billion DMIC project on a PPP model, for which the government is committed to develop the trunk infrastructure on its own. The DMIC Trust and the Government of Gujarat formed the DICDL to administer the special investment region.
Anchor tenants (usually the first, and the leading, tenants in a shopping centre whose prestige and name recognition attracts other tenants and, it is hoped, shoppers) are being allocated land plots from five hectares to 100 hectares in contiguous land parcels in Dholera.
DMICDC Logistics Data Service centres have already become operational at 13 ports, 22 port terminals, 120 Container Freight Stations- Inland Container Depots (CFS-ICDs) and 25 toll plazas across India.
Dholera is expected to become one of the best Indian world-class industrial smart cities by 2042.
