2024 Lok Sabha elections: Make in India and a tale of two cities

On a day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed three public rallies across Gujarat and other leaders went all out campaigning in the state, Sanand meant business. Sanand, a major industrial hub with manufacturing plants of Indian and foreign companies, is not politically indifferent. “Sanand does not need campaigns or rallies when Amit bhai (Shah) is there,’’ explains Ajit Shah, president of Sanand Industries Association (SIA).

Sanand, a 45-minute drive from Ahmedabad, comes under the Gandhinagar constituency where Union Home Minister Amit Shah, 59, is seeking re-election as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate. In this prestigious constituency, represented earlier by leaders, such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L K Advani, the Congress is fielding All India Congress Committee Secretary and architect by profession Sonal Patel, 62.      

The association office inside the Sanand-GIDC (Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation) complex started warming up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections as office bearers heading the various wings in the hub chipped in with their views on a hot Thursday afternoon. Then the conversation shifted to business: Is semiconductor/electronics taking the limelight away from automobiles, which formed the core of Sanand? Ajit Shah of SIA nodded but said the automobile factor was still there. “There’s room for everyone.’’                  
 

A drive around 2,200 hectares (22 million sq m) in the Sanand-GIDC hub took this reporter from one brand to another, one sector to another. While the Tata group made Sanand famous over 15 years ago when it shifted the Nano plant here from West Bengal’s Singur, the buzz now is around Idaho-headquartered US major Micron, whose India managing director Anand Ramamoorthy earlier this week said it hoped to roll out the first bat­ch of chips packaged in Sanand in 2025.      

With so much interest around Micron, it had to be the first stop while doing a recce of the Sanand complex, where 60-70 per cent of the allottable land had already been given to firms. Micron is learnt to be in the process of starting a pilot of its chip-packaging project from a mini plant in Sanand. The main plant, spread across 93 acres, is under construction for a semiconductor chip assembly, testing, monitoring, and packing (ATMP) facility.

Sanand’s gain may have been Dholera’s loss when Micron made its India choice. When this reporter was in Dholera a day earlier, its distance from Ahmedabad came up in multiple conver­s­a­tions. Many firms may have preferred Sanand to Dholera for its distance from the closest big city and international airport. Sanand is 22 km from Ahmedabad. Dholera is 100 km away.

However, for the Gujarat government, which is offering many incentives to the industry to step up manufacturing, Dholera and Sanand are equals. Senior officials at the Gujarat Secretariat were emphatic that transport infrastructure and connectivity would improve significantly in the coming months in the Dholera Special Investment Region (SIR).

Ever since Tata Electronics decided to set up its semiconductor plant in Dholera, the greenfield town has got a new lease of life, officials pointed out. And Dholera has got a new moniker — from a smart city, it’s now being called a semicondu­ctor city, the first such in India.

Executives working in Dholera, which so far has Tata Electronics and Renew Power as the two major brands, pointed out that the highway connecting Ahmed­abad and Dholera is speeding up and by August, the time taken to travel between the two cities would halve. Rail connecti­vity is also a task in progress. And, the Dholera International Airport, which would decide the fate of the town, has many deadlines to meet — August 2025 for the runway, December 2025 for cargo movement, and civil aviation by 2026.

Even as Sanand has its advantages over Dholera at this point, both continue to rely on marquee brands to bring their ecosystem and help improve the overall infrastructure of the place. If about 15 years ago, the Tatas had done that with Nano and the related ecosystem in Sanand, officials indicated that the same could happen at Dholera with Tata Electronics getting in its allied businesses there. Social infrastructure (meaning schools, hospitals, and recreation clubs) is the go-to theme for both industrial hubs. Even as Tesla founder Elon Musk’s decision to cancel the India visit and travel to China has upset most, both at Dholera and Sanand, the verdict is that it’s Tesla’s loss!    
 

Meanwhile, Dholera SIR, which would come up bigger than Singapore spread over 920 sq km (once completed), also has an election on May 7. Part of the Ahmedabad East constituency, voters here (mainly local villagers) are seeing door-to-door campaigns to make them decide between BJP candidate Hasmukh Patel, 63, and Himmatsinh Patel, 58.