Gujarat Has the Longest Coastline of Any Indian State at 2,340.62 Kilometres and Produced Rs 3.71 Lakh Per Resident in 2024-25, 58 Per Cent Above the National Average

Gujarat has the longest coastline of any Indian state. The Ministry of Earth Sciences told Parliament on 4 December 2025 that a re-survey by the National Hydrographic Office and the Survey of India puts it at 2,340.62 km, up from 1,214.70 km, ahead of Tamil Nadu at 1,068.69 km and Andhra Pradesh at 1,053.07 km. Only the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a Union territory, has more, at 3,083.50 km. The same re-measurement, made along the high-water line, raised India’s total from 7,516.6 km to 11,098.81 km.

Gujarat’s economy produced Rs 3,71,016 for every resident in 2024-25 at current prices, according to PRS Legislative Research, against Rs 2,34,859 for India, about 58 per cent more. That is gross state domestic product (GSDP, the value of what a state produces in a year) divided by population, so it measures output per head and not what the average resident earns. Total GSDP was Rs 27,03,518 crore. Population figures below come from the 2011 Census, which counted 6,04,39,692 people, because the next census is still under way.

How Gujarat came to be a state

Gujarat took its present form on 1 May 1960, the appointed day under the Bombay Reorganisation Act, 1960. Section 3 formed the state from 17 districts of Bombay State, among them Ahmedabad, Surat, Rajkot, Kutch and Banaskantha, together with villages in the Thane and West Khandesh districts. The Press Information Bureau’s statehood explainer describes it as created out of 17 northern districts of the former state.

Bombay had been one composite state since 1956. The Supreme Court’s judgment in Babulal Parate v. State of Bombay, decided on 28 August 1959, records that the 1956 Bill had proposed three units, a Union territory of Bombay, Maharashtra, and Gujarat including Saurashtra and Cutch, and that Parliament instead constituted a single composite State of Bombay under Section 8(1) of the States Reorganisation Act.

The 1960 Act set up the state’s institutions from the appointed day. Section 13 gave Gujarat an Assembly of 132 members and Section 28 gave it a separate High Court. The High Court says it was established on 1 May 1960 with Justice Sunderlal Trikamlal Desai as its first Chief Justice, began work near Akashwani in Navrangpura, Ahmedabad, and has sat at Sola, Ahmedabad, since 16 January 1999. The PIB explainer names Gandhinagar as the capital, close to Ahmedabad.

How Gujarat is governed

The Legislative Assembly now has 182 directly elected seats, as the Second Schedule to the Representation of the People Act, 1950 lists them. Section 19 of the 1960 Act raised the first Assembly’s 132 seats to 154 when its term ended, and the Schedule now lists 182 after later redrawing of constituency boundaries, known as delimitation. Gujarat has one chamber: the Act’s Third Schedule, which lists the states with a Legislative Council or upper house, does not name it. The state sends 26 members to the Lok Sabha under the same Act and 11 to the Rajya Sabha under the Constitution’s Fourth Schedule. Why seats still follow the 1971 census is explained in our delimitation guide.

For local administration, the 2011 Census counted 26 districts, 225 sub-districts, 348 towns and 18,225 villages. The PIB gave 33 districts in 2023, and All India Radio reported that on 1 January 2025 the state cabinet approved a 34th, Vav-Tharad, to be cut out of Banaskantha.

The Gujarat Official Languages Act, 1960, published as Gujarat Act I of 1961 on 15 February 1961, makes Hindi in Devanagari script and Gujarati the languages for official purposes, except where the state government notifies otherwise. Any such notification must be laid before the Legislature, which may modify it.

Gujarat also has a line of its own in the Constitution. Article 371(2), reworded for Maharashtra and Gujarat with effect from 1 May 1960, lets the President by order give the Governor a special responsibility for separate development boards for Saurashtra, Kutch and the rest of Gujarat. The same responsibility covers the “equitable allocation of funds for developmental expenditure” across those areas and fair access to technical education and state jobs. Each board’s report goes to the Assembly every year. Our guide to Article 371 sets the provision beside those for other states.

What Gujarat’s economy is made of

PRS estimates that in 2024-25 agriculture made up 19.5 per cent of Gujarat’s economy at current prices, manufacturing 43.9 per cent and services 36.6 per cent, and that real GSDP grew 7.4 per cent against 6.5 per cent for India.

Factories carry much of that output. In the Annual Survey of Industries for 2023-24, released by the Ministry of Statistics on 27 August 2025, Gujarat held 19.53 per cent of the country’s fixed capital and produced 17.22 per cent of factory output, the highest shares among states. Its 14.20 per cent of gross value added (output minus the cost of inputs) was second to Maharashtra’s 15.95 per cent.

The state’s budget for 2026-27, presented on 18 February 2026, expects Rs 2,71,602 crore in revenue receipts, of which PRS counts 71 per cent as raised by the state and 29 per cent as coming from the Centre. State GST is 49 per cent of its own tax revenue. It targets a revenue surplus of 0.8 per cent of GSDP and a fiscal deficit of 2 per cent, with outstanding public debt at 14.7 per cent of GSDP at the end of the year. In Table 8.9 of its report for 2026-31, the Sixteenth Finance Commission gives Gujarat 3.755 per cent of the states’ share of central taxes. The Commission also notes that all four of the state’s government-owned electricity distribution companies ranked in the top 10 utilities in four successive annual ratings by the Power Finance Corporation.

GIFT City, in Gandhinagar, is India’s first International Financial Services Centre, set up under the Special Economic Zones Act, 2005. The PIB’s November 2025 explainer says its regulator, the International Financial Services Centres Authority, was created under a 2019 Act and has operated since April 2020, taking over powers that the Reserve Bank, SEBI, the insurance regulator and the pension regulator held for such centres. It counts at least 1,034 registered entities and 38 banks with assets of $100.14 billion.

What sets Gujarat apart

The PIB describes the Asiatic lion as found only in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat. Its release on World Lion Day 2025 puts the May 2025 estimate at 891 lions, up from 674 in 2020, spread over about 35,000 square kilometres in 11 Saurashtra districts. Barda Wildlife Sanctuary, in Porbandar and Devbhumi Dwarka districts, held 17 after lions arrived there on their own in 2023. Our account of the Gir lions covers the disease and translocation disputes.

Gujarat’s best-known dairy cooperative began with a strike. Farmers in Kaira district, who sold milk to contractors supplying the Bombay Milk Scheme, resolved at a meeting at Samarkha village on 4 January 1946 to form village societies, and Amul Dairy’s history says a 15-day milk strike followed. The Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union was formally registered on 14 December 1946. It began pasteurising milk in June 1948 from two village societies producing about 250 litres a day, and the National Dairy Development Board was set up at Anand in 1965. Verghese Kurien and Operation Flood tells what followed.

The state also makes most of India’s salt. The Indian Bureau of Mines, citing the Salt Commissioner, gives Gujarat 227.64 of India’s 266 lakh tonnes in 2021-22, or 85 per cent. Gandhi’s march of 1930 ended at Dandi on this coast, a story told in our piece on the salt tax.

A dry state and a pending court challenge

Article 47 of the Constitution says the State shall “endeavour to bring about prohibition of the consumption except for medicinal purposes of intoxicating drinks”. Section 87 of the Bombay Reorganisation Act left laws in force before 1 May 1960 applying to the same territories. The statute now called the Gujarat Prohibition Act, 1949 predates the state.

Petitions in the Gujarat High Court challenge the Act’s ban on consumption as manifestly arbitrary and as a breach of the right to privacy recognised in the Supreme Court’s Puttaswamy judgment of 2017. The State objected that the High Court could not sit in appeal over State of Bombay v. F.N. Balsara, in which the Supreme Court upheld some sections of the Act. The petitioners replied that the challenge in Balsara was limited to medicinal and toilet preparations. On 23 August 2021 a Division Bench led by the Chief Justice held the petitions maintainable and listed them for final hearing on 12 October. We found no report of a final ruling.

What comes next

The PIB says GIFT City, now about 1,000 acres, is being expanded to more than 3,300 acres. The 2026-27 budget plans capital outlay of Rs 1,07,160 crore, 25 per cent above the revised estimate for 2025-26.

PRS also notes that the Comptroller and Auditor General reported a 23 per cent shortage of doctors and of paramedics in Gujarat’s public health institutions as of March 2022, and that the budget sets aside 7.1 per cent for health against the 8 per cent the National Health Policy, 2017 recommends.