How much surplus land does the Indian government own?

6 min readApr 7, 2022

A company registered by the name of Free A Billion Private Limited set out some researchers to estimate surplus government land. One of their sister organization says that they estimated total surplus public land (of both the Central and State governments) to be at ~ Rs. 340 lakh crore. Adding to this estimate, they say

The data on the unused public lands was collected by researchers at Free A Billion from authoritative governmental and non-governmental sources. These sources include Parliamentary Questions, data collected by various NGOs and think-tanks, government databases, information available from various Ministries and Departments of the Government of India.

Sources given by Free A Billion Pvt Ltd

I don’t have full faith on this estimate because they have not released the exact sources they have used for all of the Rs. 340 lakh crore claimed — they have only given sources for ~25% (by value) of what they claim. They have identified ~4,160 square kilometer of idle land valued at ~Rs. 88 lakh crore (i.e. ~25% of the total value they have claimed) belonging to the Central government and several State governments. I’m attaching screenshots of the tables where they have put the area and value of the land they have identified but if you want to look at the exact sources, you can visit the page yourself by clicking here and then click on each cell in the column under “Body Name”.

I could find a few independent sources to cross-check if their estimate makes sense.

Cross checking Free A Billion

A few years ago, the Central government actually came up with a figure of how much land 41 of their 51 ministries and 22 of over 300 PSEs they own, and it was 13,505 square kilometers. For reference, the total area of Delhi is 1,483 square kilometers. So the Central government owns land equal to ~9 Delhi’s. Note that the 13,505 square kilometer figure given by the government still misses 10 Union ministries, some MoD land (for security reasons), more than 280 Central PSEs and all the land owned by State governments, so total government land will be more than 13,505 square kilometers.

For context, Free A Billion gave sources for 383,331 acres of surplus land belonging to the Central government. That comes out to be around 1551 square kilometers, which is around 11.5% of the total land declared by the Central government.

Now The Hindu reports that according to the Comptroller and Auditor General of India:

The Ministries of Railways and Defence, respectively, have 43,000 hectares and 32,780 hectares of land lying vacant, without even any proposed use […] the 13 major port trusts have 14,728 hectares of land lying idle.

To be consistent with the units I have been using, the Ministry of Railways has 430 square kilometers, Ministry of Defense has 327.8 square kilometers and the port trusts have 147.28 square kilometers of idle land. This totals to 905.08 square kilometers, or 6.7% of total declared land of the Central government (13,505 square kilometers). This is a little more than half of the surplus land for which Free A Billion gave its sources. I couldn’t find enough time to dig through CAG reports to find if it has figures for surplus land under other departments. I might do it for a future post but there are reasons to believe that Free A Billion isn’t overestimating the total surplus land (rather underestimating):

We can convert the surplus land of the Port Trusts (of 13 major ports I believe) given in hectares to acres. It comes out to be ~35,968 acres. But Free A Billion identified only 27,379 acres as surplus. If we visit their page on Port Trusts, we can see that they have given a breakdown for 10 ports, so it is possible that the rest of the surplus land identified by CAG is either of the remaining 3 (major) ports or some extra in any of these 10 ports. But what is clear is that that Free A Billion could be underestimating the total surplus land.

Value of the surplus land

Using the figures for which Free A Billion have given sources, we can calculate the average value of land. It comes out to be ~Rs. 4,100 per square feet for Central government land identified and ~Rs. 4,300 per square feet for State government land identified excluding Odisha Revenue Board. I excluded Odisha Revenue Board because it is an outlier since has more than 50% of the total land identified but is valued at much less than 1% of the total value but if you include it, the value of State government land will be ~Rs. 700 per square feet.

If I take the average value of surplus government land to be Rs. 4,000 (which seems reasonable), the Central and State governments would have to own ~7,800 square kilometers to get the total value of surplus government land at Rs. 340 lakh crore. This is around 8 times the surplus land identified by CAG and around 2 times the surplus land for which Free A Billion have given sources including Odisha Revenue Board but 4 times if we exclude Odisha Revenue Board. It is possible that the appraisal method that is used for Odisha Revenue Board land is not accurate, in which case it would not be an outlier. I haven’t studied the appraisal methods used for different plots in different states and so I can’t comment on it right now. It may be a topic of discussion in a future post.

But for a moment I just want to put the 4,160 square kilometers of surplus land that Free A Billion has given sources for in context. This is roughly equal to 4500 crore square feet, or around 45 square per adult. If we take FSI to be 3, it translates to around 135 square feet of constructed area per adult. If the government leased all this surplus land, collected rent on it and distributed that rent equally amongst all adults, each adult will get a rent for around 135 square feet (or more or less depending on FSI).

UPDATE (30 June 2023): I contacted one of the directors of Free A Billion Pvt. Ltd. to figure out how have they come up with the figure of Rs. 340 lakh crore but their response wasn’t satisfactory. Here’s the exchange of emails I had with them:

I should have actually written mineral reserves of ~Rs. 5000e12 and not ~1001e12, because Rs. 1001e12 is supposed to be the resource rent paid to the government for that amount of reserves according to them but that’s not relevant for this post.