65 villages could be added to Ahmedabad

AHMEDABAD: Last year the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) split its largest administrative zone, the New West Zone into two new zones, North West and South-West. The zone originally comprised one-third of the city’s geographical area and covered nearly 9.22 lakh residents. Now each new zone has half of that number of residents, and can accommodate more.

Next to these new administrative zones are Ahmedabad’s satellite outgrowth centres. These areas have been demanding integration into the municipal area. Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA) recently announced Rs 534 crore of infrastructure projects to solve water, sewer, traffic and affordable housing issues for Bopal, Godhavi, Ghuma, and Shela areas. Between 2009 and 2014, the state urban development department was under pressure to include several villages within the urban agglomerate. After the 2011 census, 65 villages were eligible to be included in municipal or AUDA limits.
Now, the state government has finally started the process of adding village panchayats to municipalities and including municipalities to cities such as Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot as suggested by Census 2011.
According to standard practice, the state government has to declare the inclusion of new urban areas identified in the last census as urban agglomeration outgrowth (OG) areas and census towns (CT).
Sources in the state urban development department said, “According to Census 2011, 65 villages and other areas will be included in the urban agglomeration (UA) of Ahmedabad city. These include 46 villages as outgrowths (OGs) and 10 as census towns (CTs). The new UA area of Ahmedabad includes Gandhinagar and Sanand and villages near these adjoining cities.”
“Places like Vapi, Gandhidham have shown exceptional development potential and qualify for higher urban status. Many village and census towns have qualified to be municipalities or even municipal corporations. The government will need to change the status of these areas gradually, after due process. Besides Ahmedabad, other large cities such as Surat, Rajkot and Vadodara have also witnessed inclusion of many areas in their UAs. The number of cities and urban pockets have also increased considerably and these will be considered while announcing the formation of new urban local bodies,” sources added.