Cabinet Approves Jodhpur-Pali Industrial Smart City Under NICDP — 28 August 2024 Decision Record

What the Cabinet Decided

In a decision on Wednesday, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved 12 new project proposals under the National Industrial Corridor Development Programme, coming up with an estimated investment of Rs 28,602 crore. Spanning across 10 states and strategically planned along six major corridors, the approved industrial areas included Khurpia in Uttarakhand, Rajpura-Patiala in Punjab, Dighi in Maharashtra, Palakkad in Kerala, Agra and Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, Gaya in Bihar, Zaheerabad in Telangana, Orvakal and Kopparthy in Andhra Pradesh, and Jodhpur-Pali in Rajasthan.

The CCEA meeting was held in New Delhi on 28 August 2024, and with this approval the total number of projects under NICDP rose to 44. The approval is a Cabinet-level clearance of the project proposal and its funding envelope — it is not itself a land notification, RERA registration or construction start order. Those steps sit with the state government, RIICO and the JPMIA Development Authority.

Jodhpur-Pali: The Specific Numbers Announced

Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, briefing on the Rajasthan component the same day, gave the project-specific figures. The Jodhpur-Pali Industrial Smart City project costs Rs 922 crore and the investment figures include Rs 7,500 crore. The Rs 922 crore is the public project cost (infrastructure build-out); the Rs 7,500 crore is the investment potential the government expects to attract from anchor industries and MSMEs once plots are allotted.

Shekhawat said the inclusion of Jodhpur-Pali will improve the standard of living for citizens and give a significant boost to the growth of Jodhpur-Pali, propelling the entire Jodhpur region toward new heights of progress. The NICDC project page for the site (formally the Jodhpur-Pali-Marwar Industrial Area, JPMIA) gives the operative site data: the site is 60 km from Marwar Junction, with clearance obtained from the MoEF&CC, and with 100% of the land in possession of the state government, JPMIA offers an investment potential of ₹7,500 crore and an employment potential of 40,000 jobs.

Scale and Physical Footprint

Jodhpur-Pali is a greenfield industrial smart city project developed as part of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, planned as a major industrial hub in western Rajasthan and the state's largest industrial area, developed as a self-sustained integrated industrial township spread over nearly 3,600 hectares under an SPV, about 30 km from Jodhpur airport. A separate figure from an exam-reference source puts the same footprint at approximately 3,600 hectares (≈8,900 acres), located near Rohat in Pali district, about 30 km from Jodhpur, consistent with the NICDC and media figures.

For the first construction tranche: in the first stage 640 hectares will be developed at a cost of Rs 465 crores, on an Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) model, as part of the National Industrial Corridor Development Corporation programme. An agreement has already been finalised between RIICO and NICDC, and the project is expected to generate 55,000 direct employment opportunities and 1 lakh indirect employment opportunities — a higher jobs figure than NICDC's own 40,000 headline number, reflecting different scope (phase-1 vs. full build-out) or differing estimate vintages. Readers should treat the NICDC project-page figure (40,000 jobs, ₹7,500 crore) as the more authoritative current baseline.

Land Status and the JPMIA Development Authority

The Jodhpur-Pali site was not newly acquired for this 2024 Cabinet decision — the land base predates it. Discussions about JPMIA started a decade earlier, but it was only in October 2020 that the Pali District Collector officially transferred all government land from nine revenue villages — Dungarpur, Singari, Dhundhali, Doodali, Neembli Patelan, Neembli Bramnan, Danasani, Rohat and Dalpatgarh — to the JPMIA Development Authority. The land was earmarked for an industrial park as part of the larger Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor.

That transfer has been contested: in 2021, villagers of Dungarpur filed a case against the transfer of 864.6148 hectares of "public utility" land — including land reserved for gauchar (pasture), agor (water catchment areas) and orans (sacred groves) — to the JPMIA Development Authority, arguing the Gram Panchayat should have had a hearing before the transfer. Petitioners cite Section 16 of the Rajasthan Tenancy Act, 1955 protecting such lands, and Section 27(2) of the Rajasthan Special Investment Regions Act, 2016, which requires a notification and hearing with the local authority before public land vested in a Gram Panchayat is transferred. This dispute concerns roughly a quarter of the total JPMIA footprint and predates, and is separate from, the August 2024 Cabinet approval — but it is directly relevant to any due-diligence on plots inside the Rohat-Dungarpur sector.

Planning Framework: Master Plan-2042 and Phasing

The area is governed by a long-range statutory plan rather than a single build-out date. The Master Plan for Jodhpur-Pali-Marwar Industrial Area-2042 sets out a spatial distribution for eight target industry sectors across the notified zone. The Phasing Plan is subdivided into development periods running from 2016 to 2042, reflecting year-wise phasing of the various sectors (blocks) of the land-use plan. Public/semi-public infrastructure is carved out separately: approximately 356 hectares of urbanisable area have been designated for specific public and semi-public uses, according to the scale of the proposed industrial township. The plan document also notes the site's regional position: the JPMIA delineated zone is about 40 km from Jodhpur, the primary urban centre in the study area. (This 40 km master-plan distance and the 30 km distance cited in press reports both appear in official material — the discrepancy likely reflects different reference points, e.g., city centre vs. airport.)

Practical Effect of the Decision

The 28 August 2024 CCEA approval formally brought Jodhpur-Pali inside the national NICDP funding and governance framework, alongside 11 other sites. With this approval, the total number of projects to be developed under NICDP rose to 44. In concrete terms for the region:

• It confirmed central government financial backing (within the ₹922 crore project cost) rather than leaving JPMIA solely a state/RIICO scheme.
• It set an expected ₹7,500 crore private investment target and a 40,000-job employment target for the site, per NICDC's own project listing.
• The hubs, including Jodhpur-Pali, are expected to be completed within three years of approval, targeting industries such as technical textiles, electric vehicles, aero logistics, food processing and tourism.
• It did not resolve or address the pre-existing 2021 litigation over pasture and common land inside the JPMIA boundary — that remains a separate, unresolved legal track.

As of the most recent reporting found (October 2025), Phase-1 civil works tendering for the 640-642 hectare first stage had reportedly been completed, with the RIICO-NICDC implementation agreement in place — but no source found in this research confirms handover of developed, allotment-ready plots to industry as of that date. Investors and residents should treat Jodhpur-Pali as a Cabinet-approved and centrally-funded project under active phase-1 execution, not yet an operational industrial city.