The Gujarat Assembly on Friday, 11 September, passed the Gujarat Prevention of Fragmentation and Consolidation of Holdings (Amendment) Bill, 2026, which revises the 1947 law known in villages as the Tukda Dhara. Revenue Minister Rushikesh Patel moved the bill, according to DeshGujarat. It makes three changes permanent. Violations of the Act since 1948 are regularised without penalty, a single 10-guntha minimum plot size applies across rural Gujarat, and urban areas fall outside the law altogether.
The government first brought these changes in through an ordinance in July, which had cleared the Governor and the President by then, Gujarat Samachar reported. An ordinance lapses unless the legislature passes a bill to replace it, so Friday’s vote puts the reform on statutory footing.
What the old law did
The 1947 Act set a “standard area” for farmland, the smallest plot considered viable to cultivate, and treated any sale or transfer that created a smaller piece as a violation. The standard area varied by district and by type of land. Families still split fields among heirs and sold slivers to neighbours, often through agreements that the revenue records never reflected. Those buyers held land they could not register cleanly, mortgage or pass on without a dispute.
Under the old rules, an owner could regularise such a transfer by paying a penalty of 10% of the jantri value, and even then the land stayed technically invalid, DeshGujarat reported. Many owners simply lived with the defect.
The three changes
- Regularisation without penalty. Violations from 1948 up to 31 March 2026 are regularised with no penalty or premium. The cut-off date matters: a fragment created after 31 March 2026 gets no relief.
- One minimum size. The state notified a uniform standard area of 10 gunthas, about 1,012 sq m or roughly a quarter of an acre, on 12 August 2026. From now on, nobody in rural Gujarat can create a plot smaller than that. The government also keeps the power to set different standard areas for particular localities by gazette notification.
- Cities excluded. Land inside municipal corporations, municipalities and urban development authority areas no longer comes under the Act. The government has linked this to faster non-agricultural (NA) conversion and urban development.
What it means for landowners
The biggest group of beneficiaries are families holding small parcels bought or divided decades ago. If you own such a piece, the old 10% jantri penalty no longer applies to any transfer made before 31 March 2026. Once the records are corrected, the land can serve as collateral for a crop loan and pass to heirs without a fight. The change pairs with the Land Revenue (Amendment) Bill passed a day earlier, which writes same-day mutation of land records into law.
The 10-guntha floor cuts both ways. A single number is simpler than a district-by-district table, but wherever the old standard area was larger than 10 gunthas, owners can now sell smaller pieces than before. The urban exemption has a clearer winner. Farmland on the edges of Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot that falls inside a development authority’s limits can now be divided and converted without Tukda Dhara checks, which should help landowners and developers on city fringes.
The amnesty carries a trade-off too. It clears genuine hardship cases, and it also clears anyone who broke the law on purpose. The reports we reviewed did not record the Opposition’s position on the bill.
What to watch
The Assembly vote settles the law. The practical test comes at the mamlatdar’s office. Landowners should look for the Revenue Department’s procedure for regularisation: whether the change applies automatically to old entries or needs an application, and how quickly talatis update village records. Watch as well for any locality-specific standard areas the government notifies under its new power, since those would override the 10-guntha rule in particular places.
Sources: DeshGujarat, Gujarat Samachar
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.