On 11 November 2025, Preliminary Town Planning Scheme No. 3B (Panchi, Sangasar, Sandhida) was sanctioned — the first preliminary sanction from the DTPS-3 family. This is not a press release: the record here was read directly from the gazette notification (No. SIRAA/03/2025/001, signed by CEO Swaroop P) on the official portal — the statute itself, published in the Gujarat Government Gazette Extraordinary.
What happened
The notification sanctioned Preliminary TP Scheme 3B under section 6(2)(iv)/17(2) of the Gujarat SIR Act 2009 read with section 65 of the Gujarat Town Planning & Urban Development Act 1976. Its recitals confirm that the Town Planning Officer had split draft DTPS-3 into four sub-schemes — 3A, 3B, 3C1 and 3C2 — under section 63 of GTPUDA, and the schedule carried a detail typical of genuine planning work: one road width modified from 24 m to 25 m to conform to the sanctioned Development Plan.
Preliminary sanction is the stage at which a TP scheme becomes operative: original agricultural plots are reconstituted into final plots with defined ownership, roads and land uses are fixed, and development permissions become possible. Before this stage, a scheme is a proposal on maps; after it, it is the operative land law for its area.
The background
The machinery behind this notification is the reason Dholera exists in developable form at all. The region was never mass-acquired; it was assembled through land pooling under the TP-scheme mechanism of GTPUDA 1976, as enabled for SIRs by the 2009 Gujarat SIR Act. Under the mechanism, landowners contribute their holdings to a scheme and receive back 30–60% of the original area as serviced, reconstituted plots — the land absorbs the cost of roads, drainage and utilities, and owners participate in the value uplift rather than exiting it.
The DTPS-3 family carries that history in its file. Draft TP Schemes 3, 4, 5 and 6 were sanctioned in a single gazette batch on 24 October 2013 — DTPS-3 covering the villages of Sodhi, Sangasar, Panchi, Sandhida, Mundi, Dholera, Otariya and Cher — after declaration of intention in January 2012 and draft submission in December 2012. A twelve-year arc from draft declaration (2012) through split (3A/3B/3C1/3C2 under sec. 63) to the first preliminary sanction (2025) is long by any standard, and is honest context for both the project’s critics and its defenders: land-law maturation in a 920 sq km region is slow, but it is also durable once done.
The details
Geographically, 3B’s villages — Panchi, Sangasar, Sandhida — sit in the northern TP belt of the SIR, an area that had remained outside the earliest operative footprint. That matters because the operative footprint until then had been narrow: TP 2A and 4A (the sub-schemes operationalising TP2/TP4 for the activation area) were preliminarily sanctioned back in July 2018, and the ~22.5 sq km activation area carved from TP2-East and part of TP4 was where all completed trunk infrastructure sits.
A northern preliminary sanction therefore extends the developable Dholera beyond the activation area for the DTPS-3 family — land that can now legally move from farmland to serviced plots as the TP machinery progresses. The arithmetic of the mechanism is that pooling funds its own servicing; each operative scheme brings its share of the road grid and utility corridors with it.
The 3B sanction also foreshadowed the shape of things to come: one month later the archive recorded the CM’s review cadence and the accelerating international engagement (JBIC, November 2025), and within five months came the landmark 30 March 2026 gazette batch — ten preliminary sub-schemes (1A1, 1A2, 2B1, 2B2, 2B3, 3A, 4B1, 5A, 5B, 6A) sanctioned in a single day, Gazette Extraordinary Nos. 186–195, all signed by CEO Avantika Singh Aulakh.
Why it matters to Dholera:
Each preliminary sanction converts draft-stage schemes into operative ones — original plots reconstituted into final plots, permissions become possible. 3B’s villages sit in the northern TP belt of the SIR. For a land-pooled greenfield city, the operative-scheme count is the truest measure of progress: it counts land where the state’s promise has matured into law, where an owner can hold a final plot, and where development permission is a filing rather than a hope.
For the region’s original landowning families in Panchi, Sangasar and Sandhida, the sanction is the concrete realisation of the pooling bargain entered a decade earlier: their retained plots now carry defined status within an operative scheme adjacent to a region whose land values have re-rated dramatically.
And for investors and industrial tenants, preliminary sanctions expand the credible build-out frontier — the map of where the next serviced, legally clean land parcels will come from.
The bigger picture
3B stands between two land-tenure epochs: the 2012–13 draft notifications that created the schemes and the 2026 gazette batch that made ten sub-schemes operative in one day. In that arc, 3B is the hinge — proof that the pipeline from draft to operative was flowing again, even if slowly, before the floodgates opened.
What came next: the landmark 30 March 2026 gazette batch — ten sub-schemes sanctioned in one day — documented in our March 2026 entry, with the full machinery explained in Ch. 10 — TP schemes & land pooling.
Verified sources
This is an archive entry from our milestone backfill — verified against the sources below, with the event date kept true to history.