On 24 July 2026 the Cabinet approved BHAVYA Rasayan, a Rs 3,030 crore scheme for three chemical parks by 2030-31. States will compete for them, and each winner gets up to Rs 1,000 crore from the Centre to build shared plant that chemical makers otherwise have to build or do without: effluent treatment, hazardous-waste disposal, solvent recovery, steam and pipelines. It is a separate scheme from the Rs 33,660 crore BHAVYA programme for 100 general industrial parks that this blog covered last week.

India has tried to plan chemical clusters before. This piece sets out what the new scheme pays for, which part of India’s chemical import bill it can plausibly reduce, and what happened to the two closest precedents: the 2007 petroleum, chemicals and petrochemicals investment regions (PCPIRs), and the 2020 bulk-drug parks, whose design BHAVYA Rasayan copies almost exactly.

What the scheme pays for

At the minimum size, the central grant works out to about Rs 0.5 crore an acre, half the Rs 1 crore an acre ceiling in the general BHAVYA parks. The three parks together need at least 24 sq km, under 2% of the 1,377 sq km already notified for the three PCPIRs. The money is for shared utilities only; the plants themselves are left to private investors.

Which imports a park can replace

India does not run a deficit in chemicals as a whole. In 2025-26 it imported US$27.9 billion of organic and inorganic chemicals and exported US$28.7 billion, on the commerce ministry’s quick estimates. The deficit is in plastics: US$22.8 billion of resins and plastic materials imported in 2025-26, against all plastics exports, finished products included, of about US$12.5 billion in 2024-25.

From this blog’s corrected top-15 table, built from DGCI&S TradeStat. By HS chapter, the same source puts 2025-26 imports at Ch. 29 Organic chemicals, US$25.41 bn; Ch. 39 Plastics and articles, US$22.23 bn; Ch. 28 Inorganic chemicals, US$14.18 bn; Ch. 38 Misc. chemical products, US$8.86 bn. The commerce ministry’s “organic and inorganic chemicals” group is narrower than chapters 28 and 29 together, because it counts some of their lines under other headings.

The biggest single gaps are polymers and the petrochemical intermediates behind them: polyethylene, polypropylene, terephthalic acid, para-xylene, ethylene glycol. Those come from crackers and aromatics complexes that cost Rs 75,000 crore to more than Rs 1 lakh crore each and bring their own utilities. A Rs 1,000 crore park will not decide whether one gets built. What shared effluent treatment, waste disposal and solvent recovery do make possible is smaller speciality and fine-chemical plants, the kind held back by pollution clearances and the cost of treating their own waste. That is useful, but it is mostly an export and value-added story, not an import-substitution one.

Correction to this blog’s earlier tables: the chemical import posts in July attached 150 KTPA of dye and 80 KTPA of pigment capacity to the “BHAVYA parks”. The Cabinet decision sets no capacity target, and those figures were this blog’s assumptions; the corrected top-15 table also shows azo-dye imports of only about US$8–25 million.

What happened to the PCPIRs

The 2007 policy expected four regions to draw about Rs 7.63 lakh crore and employ about 33.96 lakh people. Nineteen years later, three regions report Rs 3.49 lakh crore of investment, 46% of that expectation, and 3.71 lakh jobs, 11%. The investment figure covers sanctioned and committed projects, not only completed ones. Tamil Nadu’s Cuddalore-Nagapattinam region, delineated over about 229 sq km in 2017 amid farmer protests and a court challenge, no longer appears in the government’s count.

The split is the more telling number. Dahej has 2,079 of the 2,246 units, about 93%, at an average of about Rs 66 crore of investment each. The other two regions together have 167 units averaging about Rs 1,270 crore, which points to a few very large refinery and anchor projects rather than a cluster. Dahej sits beside Bharuch and Ankleshwar, Gujarat’s existing chemical belt; the regions that had to be built from a plan mostly did not fill. Visakhapatnam-Kakinada’s anchor cracker was still listed as “yet to be finalised” in the department’s undated status table.

The bulk-drug parks are the closer precedent

BHAVYA Rasayan copies the bulk-drug parks scheme of 2020 almost line for line: three parks, up to Rs 1,000 crore each, state competition, the same list of shared utilities. By December 2025, with the scheme due to end in 2026-27, Rs 180 crore of its Rs 3,000 crore had been released. Himachal Pradesh, whose park has the most detailed figures, had used Rs 116 crore of central money by June 2026 and was asking for more to build a zero-liquid-discharge plant the guidelines do not fund. The new scheme gives itself five years; the precedent suggests site preparation alone can take most of that.

What would fix this

• The Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals should publish, for each BHAVYA Rasayan park, a quarterly report of land handed over, utilities commissioned, plots allotted, investment committed and units producing, starting with the challenge-round scores of every state that applied.
• The challenge round should give weight to sites inside or next to existing chemical clusters and notified PCPIR land, where Dahej’s record shows demand already exists, over greenfield sites.
• Release of central money should be tied to anchor tenants signed, not only to construction milestones.
• The scheme should name the HS lines it expects the parks to serve, so that their effect on imports and exports can be tracked against DGCI&S data.
• The government should report realised, not committed, investment for the PCPIRs, region by region, since it told Parliament there is no monitoring dashboard.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

What this piece could not establish

The Cabinet release, the PCPIR status table and the parliamentary replies could not be opened directly; figures come from their text as indexed by search engines and from news reports (ANI, PTI, DeshGujarat). The split of PCPIR investment, units and jobs between Visakhapatnam-Kakinada and Paradeep was not published; the combined figures are this blog’s subtraction of Dahej from the total. The 2007 targets come from later government statements, not the original policy text. The plastics comparison mixes a 2025-26 import figure for raw materials with a 2024-25 export figure that includes finished products, so it shows the size of the gap, not its exact value. The challenge round’s deadlines, criteria and applicants had not been published by 27 October 2026.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.