Rajkot

Rajkot was built by a clan chief and named after his partner—a co-founding that embedded collaboration into the city's DNA from 1612. Thakur Saheb Vibhaji Ajoji Jadeja of the Jadeja Rajput clan joined with Raju Sandhi to establish a settlement in the heart of Saurashtra, Gujarat's western peninsula. The name honors Raju, not the prince—an early signal that this city would value commercial pragmatism over aristocratic display. For two centuries, Rajkot remained a modest princely state where Mahatma Gandhi spent his formative years while his father served as Diwan to the local king.

The British turned Rajkot into Saurashtra's administrative nerve center, establishing the Saurashtra Agency here to govern all the region's princely states. They built Conaught Hall, the Rajkumar College, and the communication infrastructure that connected 222 princely kingdoms through a single city. But economically, Rajkot trailed Bhavnagar, which held the coast and the port. Independence in 1947 changed everything. When the princely states merged, Rajkot became the capital of the new Saurashtra state. Industrial workers mushroomed from 2,500 in 1949 to 12,500 by 1960, initially in flour mills and workshops, then rapidly into engineering—140 machinery manufacturing units plus 51 machine tool factories within a decade.

What makes Rajkot unusual is what it chose to make. While Surat, 500 kilometres south, captured 92% of the world's diamond cutting and polishing, Rajkot specialized in the other end of the jewelry value chain: gold ornament design, silver craftsmanship, and imitation jewelry manufacturing. The city's artisans, whose skills passed through generations of Saurashtra's goldsmith families, turned precision metalwork into an export industry. Rajkot now manufactures jewelry-making machinery that competes with Italian producers in American and European markets. The same engineering culture that built machine tools in the 1950s evolved to build diesel engines, watch parts, bearings, auto components, and plastic processing machinery.

Rajkot ranked as the world's 22nd fastest-growing city between 2006 and 2020. The urban agglomeration exceeds 2 million people, making it Gujarat's fourth-largest city. The Sonibazar Area, Mavdi Industrial Area, and Pardi Industrial Zone form the manufacturing backbone. Yet the city's economic model carries risk: it depends on thousands of small and medium enterprises rather than anchor corporations, making it resilient to individual firm failures but vulnerable to sector-wide shocks in engineering or jewelry demand.

The co-founder's bargain still holds. Rajkot thrives not through dominance but through distributed craftsmanship—thousands of small workshops each contributing to an industrial ecosystem that no single player controls.