Diu Meets Its Whole Daytime Power Demand With Solar, the Union Minister Said in 2025, in a Territory Formed on 26 January 2020 by Merging Two Union Territories

Diu’s entire daytime electricity demand is met by solar power, the Union Minister for New and Renewable Energy said on 29 May 2025, and the Press Information Bureau release from his visit gave the capacity as 11.88 megawatts, made up of 9 MW on the ground and 2.88 MW on rooftops. Diu is one of three districts of the Union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, which came into being on 26 January 2020 when a merger Act of Parliament joined two territories into one.

The territory’s own administration gives the areas as 491 square kilometres for Dadra and Nagar Haveli, 72 for Daman and 40 for Diu, 603 in all. The 2011 Census, the latest published count, found 3,43,709 people in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, 1,91,173 in Daman and 52,074 in Diu, which makes 5,86,956 together.

How the territory came to exist

Portugal’s hold on Dadra and Nagar Haveli rested on the Treaty of Poona of 1779 and related Maratha grants. The International Court of Justice read those documents as a grant of revenue and not a transfer of sovereignty. The district administration says the Portuguese occupied the area between 1783 and 1785 and that their rule ended on 2 August 1954.

Portugal then asked the Hague court for a right of passage between Daman and the two enclaves. In its judgment of 12 April 1960 the Court found that Portugal had such a right in 1954 for private persons, civil officials and goods, but not for armed forces, armed police, arms and ammunition, and that India had not acted contrary to its obligations. On 12 June 1961 the Varishta Panchayat of Free Dadra and Nagar Haveli passed a resolution asking for integration with India. The Constitution (Tenth Amendment) Act, enacted on 16 August 1961 and deemed in force from 11 August, listed the territory as a Union territory in the First Schedule. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons, signed by Jawaharlal Nehru, says the people and the Panchayat had repeatedly asked for integration.

Daman and Diu have a separate story. The forest department’s history says the Portuguese obtained Daman in 1559 through a treaty with the Shah, and that Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat let them build Diu Fort and keep a garrison in 1535 under a defensive alliance. Indian forces occupied Diu on 19 December 1961 in Operation Vijay, which our account of the liberation of Goa describes. Daman and Diu stayed in one territory with Goa until Goa became a state on 30 May 1987, when Daman and Diu became a Union territory of their own, as the Goa profile explains.

Why Parliament merged them

The Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu (Merger of Union Territories) Act, 2019 received the President’s assent on 9 December 2019. The Lok Sabha had passed the Bill on 27 November and Parliament cleared it on 3 December. Section 3 forms the new territory on an “appointed day” the Centre was to notify, and the Constitution’s footnotes and the Cabinet’s January 2020 release both give that day as 26 January 2020.

The Minister of State for Home Affairs gave the Rajya Sabha the reasons on 3 December 2019. There were two secretariats and parallel departments, he said, and the Administrator, the Secretaries and the heads of certain departments worked in both territories on alternate days. Employees were separate, and central departments had to coordinate with each territory on its own. He added that service conditions and reservation would not change.

The Union Cabinet’s decisions, released on 22 January 2020, settled the first practical steps. It approved amendments to the central and territorial GST laws, an amended value added tax regulation for the merged territory, repeal of the separate Daman and Diu VAT regulation and of the Dadra and Nagar Haveli excise regulation, and an amended excise law, all to give the territory common tax authorities. It also designated Daman as the headquarters. Section 17 of the Act otherwise keeps every law in force in the area where it applied, and section 19 gave the Centre two years to adapt those laws to the new territory.

How it is governed

Article 239(1) of the Constitution says a Union territory is administered by the President through an administrator the President appoints. Article 239A lets Parliament create a legislature for Puducherry, and Article 239AA covers Delhi. The 2019 Act creates no legislature for the merged territory, so the Administrator runs it directly under the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Article 240 gives the President power to make regulations “for the peace, progress and good government” of listed territories, and since 26 January 2020 its entry (c) reads “Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu”. Under clause (2) such a regulation can repeal or amend an Act of Parliament and has the same force. The Ninth Schedule shows how long that route has been used here, since it lists the Dadra and Nagar Haveli Land Reforms Regulation of 1971 and its 1973 amendment. Our comparison of the eight Union territories sets this arrangement beside the others.

Section 6 of the Act allots the territory two Lok Sabha seats. The First Schedule of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, still shows the two earlier rows, Dadra and Nagar Haveli reserved for Scheduled Tribes and Daman and Diu unreserved. The Fourth Schedule gives Rajya Sabha seats to three territories, Delhi, Puducherry and Jammu and Kashmir, and none to this one. Section 8 keeps the Bombay High Court’s jurisdiction.

Parliament votes the money. The 2026-27 Notes on Demands for Grants carry the territory as Demand No. 54 of the Ministry of Home Affairs, with a net budget estimate of Rs 2,832.70 crore for 2026-27, of which Rs 1,732.70 crore is revenue spending and Rs 1,100 crore is capital. The actual for 2024-25 was Rs 2,636.26 crore. The same demand has lines for grants to district and village panchayats and to municipal councils, and the administration lists municipal councils at Silvassa, Daman and Diu. The article on the Union Budget explains how a demand is passed.

An economy the national tables do not count

The Ministry of Statistics said in a release of 24 July 2023 that Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, with Ladakh and Lakshadweep, do not prepare estimates of state domestic product. Its state-by-state table of per capita net state domestic product therefore has no row for the territory.

The nearest thing to an official estimate is older and covers one part. In March 2016 the National Council of Applied Economic Research delivered a report that the Government of Daman and Diu had commissioned, and it says the territory’s gross state domestic product had never been calculated before. For 2012-13 it puts Daman and Diu’s output at Rs 6,07,628 lakh (about Rs 6,076 crore) at current prices, or Rs 2,12,087 a head. Registered factories accounted for about 78 per cent of that by the report’s tables, and the report counts 1,885 registered factories that year, 1,303 of them operating. Electrical equipment, plastics and pharmaceuticals were the largest industries by average share of registered manufacturing, at 17.9, 16.9 and 13.7 per cent. Over the five years it studied, the report found, per capita output averaged 5.8 times India’s. The report cautions that its productivity numbers need care, because anecdotal evidence suggests people travel from Gujarat to work in the territory and no database counts them. We found no equivalent figure for Dadra and Nagar Haveli or for the merged territory in any official document we could open.

What sets it apart

Daman and Diu are not joined to each other. The 2016 report puts the sea distance between them at 140 kilometres and the road distance at 633. Dadra and Nagar Haveli has no coast, lies between Gujarat and Maharashtra, and has 41.63 per cent of its area under forest according to the district administration.

Diu’s solar claims come from two official releases. A Press Information Bureau release of 23 April 2018 said the city had imported 73 per cent of its power from Gujarat until the previous year, and described a 9 MW solar park on 50 hectares of rocky barren land plus rooftop panels on 79 government buildings. It said residential tariffs were cut by 10 per cent in 2017 and 15 per cent in 2018. In the 2025 release the Minister said the park had reduced transmission and distribution losses and enabled a revision of tariffs that made them more affordable, and that the investment of the past decade had been recovered through the sale of solar power. He called Diu the first district in India to meet its entire power demand with solar energy, a claim the release attributes to him.

Ghoghla beach in Diu was one of eight Indian beaches awarded the Blue Flag by an international jury, the Environment Ministry announced on 11 October 2020. The Union Environment Minister of the time said no Blue Flag nation had been awarded eight beaches in a single attempt.

The tribal share of Dadra and Nagar Haveli is large. At the 2011 Census, the National Health Systems Resource Centre’s compilation shows 1,78,564 Scheduled Tribe residents of 3,43,709, or 52.0 per cent. The district administration names the Varli, Kokana, Dhodia and Dubla among the major tribes, and its seat in the Lok Sabha is reserved for Scheduled Tribes. The administration’s profile also lists Portuguese among the languages of all three districts, beside Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi.

The 2011 sex ratio differs sharply between districts, at 534 women per 1,000 men in Daman, 774 in Dadra and Nagar Haveli and 1,031 in Diu, by the administration’s figures. The 2016 report described the combined Daman and Diu ratio as the lowest among all states and territories, and it attributed part of the pattern to male workers drawn by factory jobs between 2002 and 2007.

What comes next

The 2011 figures in this profile will give way to new ones when the census now under way is published, and the delimitation explainer shows how Lok Sabha seat numbers are tied to those counts. At the 2025 Diu review the Minister asked for faster rollout of the PM Surya Ghar rooftop solar scheme, to reach what the release calls total household saturation.