GIFT City Land Acquisition: Villages, Compensation Model and Current Status

How GIFT City's land was originally assembled

GIFT City was notified for an area of 1,065 acres and a statutory Development Plan was prepared for the said area in 2011, of which 741 acres are under GIFT City Company Ltd and the remaining area is private land. Since the total 741 acres of land in GIFT City is government wasteland, there was no special expense in land acquisition for the core project. This is why GIFT City's founding phase did not involve the large-scale farmer land acquisition seen in some other planned cities — most of the core site was already state-owned.

The expansion plan and the land-pooling model

GIFT City proposed to expand by around 2,300 acres by acquiring land from four villages in Gandhinagar district. This would take the project from 1,065 acres to around 3,365 acres, roughly three times its existing size. Crucially, this is not a standard government land-acquisition-and-award process. GIFT City's then MD and CEO said the authority would not make the acquisition itself, as the process would be costly, and that private developers would acquire the land from farmers and develop it, with the details to become clearer once the master plan was ready.

Because most of the land in the four villages — Shahpur, Ratanpur, Lavarpur and Pirojpur — is private, the state government handed development of these villages to the Gandhinagar Urban Development Authority (GUDA), which implements its own town-planning scheme and zoning plan for the area outside the core GIFT City. GIFT City's CEO also stated there would be no relocation of villagers, as the villages would simply become part of the expanded city. Under a town-planning (TP) scheme, landowners typically retain a share of reconstituted, serviced plots rather than being paid a lump-sum cash award — but no GIFT-specific plot-return ratio or per-unit compensation figure has been published in reporting reviewed for this page.

Villages covered

All villages named in the expansion fall in Gandhinagar district, Gujarat — no other district is involved.

• Shahpur
• Ratanpur
• Lavarpur
• Pirojpur
• Valad (added when the draft Development Plan was formalised)

Approximately 2,441 acres (998 hectares) of additional land belonging to Shahpur, Ratanpur, Lavarpur, Pirojpur and Valad villages — which surround GIFT City — was earmarked to expand the city's limits. The Urban Development Department's draft Development Plan of 15 December 2023 covered 3,430 acres, merging GIFT City with these five neighbouring villages. These villages have an estimated combined population of 25,000. No village-count breakdown for any other district has been reported — the entire expansion footprint sits within Gandhinagar district.

Compensation rates

No official per-acre, per-hectare or per-square-metre cash compensation rate for the four/five expansion villages has been published in the reporting reviewed for this page. This is consistent with the acquisition model described above: because GIFT City itself will not be making the acquisition and private developers are expected to acquire land directly from farmers, prices are being negotiated bilaterally rather than fixed through a government award under the Right to Fair Compensation Act. Reporting notes that because most land in the four villages is private, the acquisition cost is likely to be high, and land prices around GIFT City had risen sharply once the expansion was announced. Officials said a subsequent regulatory change — shifting the peripheral zone to GUDA's jurisdiction with lower permitted building heights — could pull down some of those inflated land prices, after developers had bought land at high rates following the expansion announcement. Readers should treat any per-acre rate quoted by brokers or agents as unverified until an official notification states it.

Budget allocated

The draft development plan allocates ₹6,200 crore across three phases over 15 years, covering roads, water supply, drainage and green infrastructure. This is being funded through central and state government grants, with a Public-Private Partnership model proposed for specific components such as roads, transit and affordable housing. This figure covers infrastructure build-out for the expanded zone; it is not a stated land-acquisition or compensation budget, since land is being assembled through private purchase and the TP-scheme mechanism rather than a government-funded award.

Objections, disputes and negotiations

Public friction so far has centred on planning permissions rather than compensation amounts. After the Urban Development Department announced its draft Development Plan on 15 December 2023 covering 3,430 acres across GIFT City and five villages, a two-month feedback window drew over 500 responses from the GIFT City office's own count, mainly on building-height restrictions and Floor Space Index (FSI) demands, while citizens and associations put the number of responses at around 800. Residents and builders pushed back against a cap limiting the expanded area to buildings of eight floors or 25 metres, with a total FSI of 2.7 (1.8 base plus 0.9 chargeable) — far lower than the up-to-120-metre towers allowed inside core GIFT City. The government's later move to hand the peripheral villages to GUDA was explicitly linked to numerous complaints and suggestions about building heights and FSI, and was expected to pull down what had become sharply rising land prices around GIFT. No farmer protest, court case or stalled-acquisition dispute specific to the four villages was found in reporting reviewed for this page; objections found relate to zoning/height rules rather than compensation amounts.

Current stage (as of mid-2026)

The large-scale expansion into four or five villages has not gone ahead as originally proposed. The 2023 proposal to add around 2,300 acres by absorbing four surrounding villages — taking the total to roughly 3,365 acres — did not move ahead in its original form, with policymakers instead opting for a more gradual development strategy emphasising orderly expansion and infrastructure readiness within the existing framework.

In its place, a much smaller expansion is now being pursued. The current plan calls for expanding GIFT City by around 161 acres (about 15%) through a combination of riverfront land reclamation and allocation of contiguous government land, with roughly 31 hectares to come from reclaiming land on the Sabarmati riverbank as part of the broader riverfront development, according to MD and Group CEO Sanjay Kaul. A draft of this revised master plan was expected to be submitted to the Government of Gujarat within about four months of the April 2026 report. This approach — reclaimed river land plus existing government land — sidesteps large-scale private farmer land acquisition altogether for the near-term expansion. The fate of the original five-village, 2,441-acre town-planning scheme has not been formally reported as cancelled, but current statements indicate it is not the active near-term plan.