Survey numbers
The unit everything is counted in
Every piece of land in Gujarat is recorded under a survey number inside a village. It is the only identifier that means anything when you are checking what land actually is, and it is the unit the whole Dholera record is counted in.
A survey number is the government's identifying number for one piece of land inside one revenue village. Land records, ownership entries and scheme documents all hang off it.
The thing people get wrong is treating it as a size. It is not. One survey number can be a fraction of a hectare and another can be many hectares, and when a piece is split the parts get suffixes rather than new numbers. Counting survey numbers tells you how finely a village is divided up, not how much land it holds.
The 2009 order counts 14,574 of them across the twenty two villages, a figure tagged OFFICIAL on this site because it is printed in a government document. We added the column up ourselves and it matches the printed total exactly.
All 14,574, village by village
| Rank | Village | Survey numbers | Share of all of them, % | Village area, sq km | Hectares per survey number |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bhadiyad | 1,908 | 13.09 | 49.7331 | 2.61 |
| 2 | Gorasu | 1,219 | 8.36 | 31.1763 | 2.56 |
| 3 | Bavaliyari | 1,204 | 8.26 | 111.2724 | 9.24 |
| 4 | Hebatpur | 1,086 | 7.45 | 72.6594 | 6.69 |
| 5 | Ambli | 1,084 | 7.44 | 55.2044 | 5.09 |
| 6 | Dholera | 969 | 6.65 | 45.8145 | 4.73 |
| 7 | Otariya | 801 | 5.50 | 18.0975 | 2.26 |
| 8 | Sangasar | 790 | 5.42 | 35.4928 | 4.49 |
| 9 | Kadipur | 648 | 4.45 | 27.3509 | 4.22 |
| 10 | Bhangadh | 620 | 4.25 | 83.0777 | 13.40 |
| 11 | Sodhi | 588 | 4.03 | 40.4975 | 6.89 |
| 12 | Sandhida | 517 | 3.55 | 18.6401 | 3.61 |
| 13 | Cher | 464 | 3.18 | 16.2436 | 3.50 |
| 14 | Zankhi | 389 | 2.67 | 22.0941 | 5.68 |
| 15 | Gogla | 385 | 2.64 | 55.4426 | 14.40 |
| 16 | Panchi | 360 | 2.47 | 13.9638 | 3.88 |
| 17 | Rahatalav | 336 | 2.31 | 63.4464 | 18.88 |
| 18 | Mundi | 316 | 2.17 | 17.8054 | 5.63 |
| 19 | Mingalpur | 261 | 1.79 | 33.0813 | 12.67 |
| 20 | Khun | 227 | 1.56 | 38.2968 | 16.87 |
| 21 | Bhimtalav | 223 | 1.53 | 7.4042 | 3.32 |
| 22 | Mahadevpura | 179 | 1.23 | 22.5431 | 12.59 |
The last column is the village area divided by its survey count. A low figure means the village is cut into many small entries. A high figure means fewer, larger ones. It is an average across a whole village and says nothing at all about any individual plot.
We checked the government's total
A total printed at the bottom of a gazette table is worth checking, so we added the column up. The survey number column adds to exactly the number printed. The area column is out by 0.0002 sq km, a discrepancy that is in the printed gazette itself and not in our reading of it.
| Check | Result |
|---|---|
| Survey numbers, added up | 14,574 |
| Survey numbers, printed total | 14,574 |
| Match | EXACT MATCH |
| Area, added up, sq km | 879.3379 |
| Area, printed total, sq km | 879.3377 |
| Match | column sums to 879.3379, printed total is 879.3377, difference -0.0002 sq km. This is an internal inconsistency in the printed gazette. Both figures are reproduced as printed; neither was adjusted. |
Neither figure has been quietly corrected. Both are reproduced as the gazette prints them.
What a survey number will not tell you here
- It will not tell you the size of the land. Our documents give counts per village and nothing per survey number.
- It will not tell you who owns it. No ownership record is in either dataset.
- It will not tell you the land class. No tenure class appears anywhere in our documents, as set out on the land classes page.
- It will not tell you whether that particular number falls inside a scheme. No list of survey numbers per scheme exists in anything we hold.
Exactly one survey number is named individually anywhere in our documents: 182/P, a pond in Otariya, which the scheme 3 sanction directs to be given back without deduction. It appears on the exempt land page.
Other questions answered here
- 01What do the words on a scheme sheet actually mean?Every term used on these documents, in one sentence of plain English, with the document that carries it.
- 02Who signs off a town planning scheme, and in what order?The stages a scheme passes through, the bodies that sign each one, and the two Dholera sanctions that exist in writing.
- 03My village is in a scheme. Is all of it in?Every scheme sheet says part villages. What that means, and why no document says how much of your village is inside.
- 04Which land is left out of the deduction?Ponds, grazing land, temples and burial grounds are named as exceptions. One pond is named by its survey number.