Jodhpur-Pali Industrial Smart City: Master Plan, Area and Phasing

Total planned area vs. area targeted for development

There are two different area figures in play for this project, and it is important not to conflate them.

• Full statutory master-plan area: The total area of the Master Plan for JPMIA under 9 villages is about 154.37 sq km, out of which 58.99 sq km has been proposed as an urbanizable area for a horizon period of 2042. The remainder of the notified area is left as green buffer, agricultural/Abadi land, water bodies and a peripheral control belt rather than being built up.
• Peripheral Control Belt: Approximately 51.29% of the total proposed Notified Urban area, totalling approx. 7,917 ha, has been designated as Peripheral Control Belt excluding Abadi and Abadi development area, green buffers, railway corridor, circulation (roads) and water bodies.
• Current NICDP-funded 'Industrial Smart City' phase: This is a smaller, currently active construction footprint. Jodhpur Pali Marwar Industrial Area (JPMIA), spanning 1,578 acres, is strategically located between Jodhpur and Pali, Rajasthan, with easy access to NH-62 and SH-64. In hectares, the initial phase covers about 642 hectares (≈1,578 acres), with development work already underway.

In short: the 2042 master plan governs roughly 5,899 ha of urbanisable land inside a ~15,437 ha notified area, while the specific 642-ha (1,578-acre) parcel is what is actually being built out right now under the NICDP-tagged smart-city scheme.

Land use: what is documented

The JPMIA Master Plan-2042 report sets aside specific hectare allocations for non-industrial uses, though a complete percentage table across every land-use category was not available in the sources reviewed. Documented allocations include:

• Approx. 356 ha of urbanisable area have been designated for specific public and semi-public uses according to the scale of the proposed industrial township and type of activities envisaged.
• Approx. 516 ha of parks and recreational open space have been specially designated in the 2042 Land Use Plan. These are split into Parks, Open Spaces, Play Grounds and an Ecological Park containing existing or proposed water bodies.

Against the 5,899 ha urbanisable envelope, that works out to roughly 6% for public/semi-public use and roughly 9% for parks and open space — the remainder is allocated to industrial, residential, commercial and circulation (roads) uses, but a full official percentage breakdown for those categories was not found in the documents reviewed, so we have not invented figures for them here.

Commercial layout is hierarchical: two district centres are strategically located to serve the northern and southern areas, accessible via arterial roads, with Sub City Centres spread throughout the industrial area to serve residential communities and smaller service nodes distributed through the industrial zones.

Phasing: how the plan is being built out

The master plan itself describes a three-phase spatial rollout rather than a rigid calendar. The Phasing Plan is subdivided into development periods from 2016 to 2042, reflecting year-wise development phasing of various sectors (blocks) of the Landuse Plan as well as individual landuse types.

Spatially, the proportion of industrial lands proposed in the Landuse Plan is higher in the earliest phase, as the industrial area is assumed to attract more commuters during earlier development phases with its dependence on the urban centers of Jodhpur and Pali. Development then grows in an anti-clockwise direction to encompass the main spine road as part of phase two, during which most blocks along NH-65 are developed. In the final phase, development continues anti-clockwise back toward the railway, with the main urban core developed alongside the area south of the railway tying into the consolidated logistics hub. No official hectare figures for these three internal phases were found in the material reviewed, so none are quoted here.

On the ground, the concrete, funded phase is the current NICDP project: Phase-A covers about 642 hectares (≈1,578 acres), with development work already underway, and includes a 2 sq km logistics hub along with industrial and residential facilities. Further expansion is planned through Phase-B and Phase-C, with additional land acquisition in progress — hectare figures and target years for those later stages have not yet been officially disclosed. Funding for the current stage is confirmed: the Jodhpur-Pali Industrial Smart City project costs Rs 922 crore, with investment figures including Rs 7,500 crore.

Population, employment and investment targets

No official resident-population target for the 2042 horizon was found in the sources reviewed, so none is quoted here. Employment and investment figures, however, are documented — with some variation between sources that should be noted:

• NICDC's own project page: Environmental Clearance has already been obtained from the MoEF&CC, and with 100% land in possession of the state government, JPMIA offers an investment potential of ₹7,500 crore and an employment potential of 40,000 jobs.
• Government/press statements (August 2025): The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved 12 new project proposals totalling an investment of Rs 28,602 crore under the NICDP, including Jodhpur-Pali.
• Other reported estimates: Some secondary reports cite considerably higher job numbers for the full build-out, including direct and indirect employment; these figures are less consistently sourced than NICDC's own 40,000-job figure, so readers should treat them as indicative rather than official.

All 12 new NICDP nodes, including Jodhpur-Pali, follow a common design brief: the new industrial cities will be developed as greenfield smart cities of global standards, built "ahead of demand" on the 'plug-n-play' and 'walk-to-work' concepts, and aligned with the PM GatiShakti National Master Plan, featuring multi-modal connectivity infrastructure.

Planning authority, statutory basis and consultants

The plan sits within two overlapping frameworks:

• Statutory land-use plan: The JPMIA Master Plan 2042, covering 9 villages of Rohat Tehsil of Pali District, was notified under the Rajasthan Urban Improvement Act, 1959, and the area was declared a Special Investment Region under the Rajasthan Special Investment Region Act, 2016 in October 2020.
• National investment-corridor programme: The project is one of 12 new industrial smart city projects approved by the Cabinet, located in Khurpia (Uttarakhand), Rajpura-Patiala (Punjab), Dighi (Maharashtra), Palakkad (Kerala), Agra and Prayagraj (Uttar Pradesh), Gaya (Bihar), Zaheerabad (Telangana), Orvakal and Kopparthy (Andhra Pradesh) and Jodhpur-Pali (Rajasthan), coordinated nationally by NICDC and implemented on the ground with RIICO and the Rajasthan government.

The specific planning/engineering consultancy firm engaged for the JPMIA Master Plan-2042 document is not named in the publicly available master-plan text or NICDC project pages reviewed for this article; we have not guessed a name in its place.

Where to find the official plan documents

The full statutory master plan report — including chapters on land use, phasing, transport and development control regulations — is published by the Rajasthan Department of Industries/Environment as the Master Plan-2042 for JPMIA PDF. NICDC also maintains a project summary page for the Jodhpur-Pali Industrial Smart City / JPMIA node with location, connectivity, land-availability and investment details. Both are listed in the Sources section below; we have not reproduced their text beyond short attributed excerpts here — consult the original documents for full maps, tables and regulations.