Gujarat

Gujarat lies on the north-western coast and has the longest coastline of any Indian state, running from the Gulf of Khambhat and the Gulf of Kutch to the border with Pakistan. The capital is Gandhinagar. The Rann of Kutch, a salt marsh that floods each monsoon and dries to a white plain, occupies the north-west.

The state is among India’s most industrialised. It refines a large share of the country’s imported crude, produces petrochemicals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and cement, and handles a large part of India’s international trade through the ports at Mundra and Kandla. Surat polishes the large majority of the world’s cut diamonds. The GIFT City financial district near Ahmedabad is the country’s attempt at an offshore financial centre, and Dholera is the site of a large semiconductor fabrication project.

Gujarat also holds the last wild population of the Asiatic lion, confined to the Gir forest and surrounding districts in Saurashtra, where numbers have recovered from a few dozen in the early twentieth century but remain concentrated in a single area. The Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada, decades in the building, supplies water and power to a large part of the state.