Gāndhīdhām, India

History

Soon after the Partition of India, in 1947, a large group of Sindhi Hindus refugees from Sindh of Pakistan migrated to India. The maharaja of Kutch Vijayaraji donated 15,000 acres (61 km2) of land to Bhai Pratap, who founded the Sindhu Resettlement Corporation Ltd. (SRC) to rehabilitate Sindhi Hindus that migrated from Sindh in Pakistan.

The Sindhu Resettlement Corporation Ltd was formed with Acharya Kriplani as chairman and Bhai Pratap Dialdas as managing director. The corporation's primary goal was to help displaced people find new dwellings by building a new township. The original plan was prepared by a team of planners headed by Otto H. Königsberger, director of the division of housing in the Government of India. Later, the plan was revised by Adams, Howard and Greeley Company in 1952. The foundation stone of the town was laid with the blessings of Mahatma Gandhi in 1947. Hence, the town was named Gandhidham. To clean the desert where it was built, Pratap gave an incentive of 25 paise to kill scorpions and 50 paise to kill snakes. The original plan envisaged 400,000 as of the ultimate population of the town, expecting half of it to be reached in the mid-1970s. A revised plan envisaged three stages of town development with the mid-stage lasting longer with a population of around 150,000.

From the History section of Gandhidham on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.