Scheme drawings
What is printed in the corner of the sheet
A town planning scheme arrives as a large drawing. What is printed in its corners, the title block, decides how much you can trust anything you read off the rest of it.
The important part of a scheme drawing is not the coloured area in the middle. It is the title block: what the plan is called, what scale it is drawn at, who signed it, and which villages it lists.
Two of the Dholera sheets we hold are pure vector drawings whose lettering was converted into shapes when the file was made. There is no text inside them at all, not even a font, so every word had to be read by eye from a picture of the page.
And the sheets themselves carry a warning that they must not be used for measurements. That single line is why this site refuses to estimate any area or boundary off a drawing, however tempting it is.
What the title blocks actually say
| Sheet | Field | What is printed | Read from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scheme 2/A | Plan Label | PLAN 3 :- ORIGINAL PLOT - FINAL PLOT MAP(OP-FP) | prelim_tps_2A.pdf p.1 |
| Scheme 2/A | Scale | SCALE 1:80 | prelim_tps_2A.pdf p.1 |
| Scheme 2/A | Signature Block | TOWN PLANNING OFFICER FOR TP 2/A, DHOLERA SPECIAL INVESTMENT REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY, GANDHINAGAR | prelim_tps_2A.pdf p.1 |
| Scheme 4/A | Plan Label | PLAN 3 :- ORIGINAL PLOT - FINAL PLOT PLAN (INDEX) | prelim_tps_4A.pdf p.1 |
| Scheme 4/A | Scale | SCALE 1CM/80MT | prelim_tps_4A.pdf p.1 |
Both of these are labelled as an original plot to final plot map, which is the drawing that shows what each owner had before the scheme against what they get after it. That is the single most useful drawing in the whole set, and neither of them carries a readable plot schedule in our copy.
Why some of it had to be read by eye
| Sheet | What had to be done, and why |
|---|---|
| Scheme 2/A | prelim_tps_2A.pdf carries no text layer and no embedded fonts (all lettering is outlined to vector curves, 89,803 drawing objects). Values were read from a high-resolution render of the page, not from machine-extracted text. |
| Scheme 4/A | prelim_tps_4A.pdf carries no text layer and no embedded fonts (all lettering is outlined to vector curves, 28,070 drawing objects). Values were read from a high-resolution render of the page, not from machine-extracted text. |
Reading a value off a picture of a page is slower and more careful than copying it out of a file, and it can still go wrong. That is why the note is printed against every record it affects rather than kept in a log somewhere.
The warning printed on the sheets
The scheme drawings carry a note saying they should not be used for measurements. It is easy to skip past, and it has real consequences for what this site will do.
We could measure the missing scheme areas off the drawings. We could work out which villages fall inside schemes 2, 4, 5 and 6 by looking at where the boundaries run. Both would produce numbers that look precise and carry no authority whatsoever, and once published they would be repeated by people who never saw this paragraph.
So those cells stay empty. An empty cell is honest. A measured guess dressed as a record is not.
Which cells this leaves empty, scheme by scheme, is on the scheme register. The full list of documents, including the four with no readable text, is on the documents 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.
- 04What is a survey number, and how many does my village have?The unit the whole record is counted in, and all 14,574 of them across the twenty two villages.