Special Investment Region

SIR stands for Special Investment Region, the legal category under which Dholera is being built. It is a large, planned industrial area created under Gujarat's Special Investment Region Act of 2009, with its own planning and land authority.

What a Special Investment Region is

A Special Investment Region, or SIR, is a category of large planned industrial zone created by the Gujarat Special Investment Region Act of 2009. The idea is to designate a big block of land, give it a dedicated statutory authority for planning and land, and build a self-contained industrial city with its own roads, utilities and governance rather than growing one piecemeal. Dholera's full name is the Dholera Special Investment Region, marketed as Dholera Smart City. Its planning envelope is about 920 square kilometres, of which roughly 580 is developable and about 422 urban, making it one of the largest such projects in India and the anchor node of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor.

Who runs the Dholera SIR

Governance is split across bodies whose acronyms recur in every Dholera document. DSIRDA is the statutory planning and land authority. DICDL, Dholera Industrial City Development Ltd, is the special-purpose company that actually builds the city, owned 51% by the Gujarat government and 49% by the central government through the NICDC Trust. NICDC, formerly DMICDC, is the central nodal agency for industrial corridors. Being inside an approved SIR also matters legally: land within an approved town-planning scheme in the SIR is treated as Non-Agricultural under Gujarat rules, though you should always verify the specifics before relying on that.