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The Gulf of Khambhat (Kalpasar) Project — a Gujarat State Government scheme to dam the Gulf of Khambhat and create one of the world's largest coastal freshwater reservoirs — is expected to significantly ease water scarcity in the Saurashtra region, the Union Minister of State for Jal Shakti told Rajya Sabha on 27 July 2026.
Its Detailed Project Report (DPR) is being finalised with Indo-Dutch technical cooperation on coastal engineering, hydraulic modelling, salinity management and climate resilience; the project also envisages about 2,470 MW of hybrid renewable energy capacity on tidal land reclaimed for the purpose.
A proposed highway-cum-rail corridor over the dam would cut the Bhavnagar-Surat road distance from about 356 km to about 177 km.
Create a giant freshwater reservoir by damming the tidal Gulf of Khambhat, to supply irrigation and drinking water to the chronically water-short Saurashtra region and improve Bhavnagar-Surat connectivity
Key: As per project technical documentation, the proposed dam runs about 60 km across the Gulf between Bharuch and Bhavnagar districts, designed to hold roughly 8,000 million cubic metres (MCM) of freshwater from the Narmada, Sabarmati, Mahi and Saurashtra rivers, over a reservoir spread of about 1,600 sq km
Because the Gulf of Khambhat is a tidal, saline arm of the Arabian Sea, damming it to hold freshwater requires preventing seawater from mixing into the impounded river water — the DPR specifically covers hydraulic studies and salinity-management engineering for this. This is why the project draws on Dutch expertise: the Netherlands has decades of experience with large tidal barrages and polder-style land reclamation (e.g., the Delta Works) facing the same salinity and storm-surge challenges.
Simple Analogy: It is like building a giant freshwater lake inside a sea inlet — the dam must let river water in and keep tidal seawater out, which is far harder than a normal river dam.
The Gulf of Khambhat (Gulf of Cambay) is an inlet of the Arabian Sea on Gujarat's coast, separating the Saurashtra peninsula from South Gujarat. The proposed dam would run across the Gulf's mouth, connecting Bhavnagar district on the Saurashtra side to Bharuch district on the mainland side.
GS Paper 1 > Indian Geography > Coastal Features; GS Paper 3 > Water Resources & Infrastructure
Occasional — resurfaces whenever Parliament questions or Gujarat state announcements update DPR status
The intrusion of saline seawater into a freshwater body or aquifer, the core engineering challenge for a tidal reservoir like Kalpasar