A visit to Tourism of Gujarat, and an attendant visit to the city of Vadodara, located in Gujarat, India, offers a golden opportunity to the tourist and the interested travelers to seek out the truth behind Vadodara, located in Gujarat, India.

Tourism of Gujarat, offers travel related information about Vadodara, situated in Gujarat, in India, that it has turned out to be a very modern and happening kind of city in the definition of the tourists and outsiders who happen to visit the city of Vadodara, located in Gujarat, India, after a long time haul.

Tourism of Gujarat, lets a well intentioned tourist know about the various attractions like Vadodara’s palatial palaces, large and ornately decorated museums and the green and expansively resplendent gardens, all second to none in terms of history attached and superficial beauty. (more…)

Vadodara with its vast industrial setup is a major contributor to the gross domestic product of the state of Gujarat. The beginning of this industrial revolution is attributed to the vision of the Gaekwad clan who had established the first bank in the city, the Bank of Baroda in the early twentieth century. The early recognition of the necessity of stable finances for a strong industrial growth by Sayajirao gave a head start to the city of Vadodara and it has never looked back.

The chemical industry took root in Vadodara in the year 1907 when Alembic Pharmaceuticals, a modern factory was set up. Then the city saw a deluge in the chemical sector and today the all the big names are located in or around Vadodara. The few important ones are the Gujarat Refinery, Indian Petrochemicals Limited or IPCL, Sarabhai Chemicals, Gujarat Dyestuff and Indian Dyestuff.

Production Process Integration. The government of India also recognized the strategic benefits of locating petrochemical industries in and around Vadodara. Public sector units like Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Gujarat Industries Power Company and the Indian government’s Heavy Water Project have been setup to take advantage of production process integration. The industries like Gujarat State Fertilizers and Chemicals and Gujarat Alkalies and Chemicals also utilize the byproducts of the petroleum industry. The cycle of byproduct utilization has spiraled and numerous small scale and cottage plastic industries have come up in the city. (more…)

The patronage of education started with Maharaja Sayajirao and the city has built further on the academic infrastructure established by him.

The present educational foundation rests on over 20 public schools and over 100 private schools. Towering benevolently over all is the MS University, the jewel in the Baroda crown, so to speak.

MSU is the only university in Gujarat with English as the only medium of instruction. It has 13 faculties and 17 residential hostels, 4 of them for women students. The university caters to over 100,000 students. There are various courses that are being offered in here ranging from Medical to Commerce.

The university has been divided into several departments and there are number of courses offered in each of the department. The fine Arts faculty is famous worldwide for its contribution in arts. The faculty of performing arts is also a very reputed institution teaching music, drama, dancing etc. (more…)

Ranging from good 3-4 star hotels with a variety of facilities to relatively inexpensive accommodation with few frills, Vadodara offers a wide range of high, medium and low budget accommodation to suit all pockets.

A traveller in extremis can even give the Retiring Rooms at the railway station a try; you need to have a ticket and you can get a clean double room with attached bath and room service for just a couple of hundred rupees.

Most of the big hotels have good in house restaurants that serve an eclectic mixture of cuisines in elegant settings.

Foreigners can be served alcoholic drinks even though technically Gujarat is a state that implements prohibition. In the more reasonably priced restaurants and cafés in Vadodara, Indian, South Indian, local Gujarati, Chinese cuisine and fast food like burgers and pizzas are available.

Vadodara is a university town and the Fine Arts Department of the MS University is amongst the very best in India. Regular exhibitions, concerts, dance and theatre performances make Vadodara the culture capital of Gujarat. (more…)

Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum: A royal collection of art treasures by masters like Raphael, Titian and Murillo as well as modern, western and Indian paintings, Graeco-Roman exhibits, Chinese and Japanese art and a large collection of contemporary Indian art are open to the public and well worth a visit.

It was established in 1961, and has an outstanding collection of the portraiture of Raja Ravi Verma, a 19th century portraitist. Another interesting section houses Chinese and Japanese porcelain artefacts, while two rooms on the ground floor are treasure troves of the Roccoco period in art. The ground floor also has a set of crystal furniture specially made for Sayaji Rao Gaekwad. The bed and chairs were part of his personal chambers. They also have royal rooms decorated as they had been in the olden days, which are also open for the public to see.

Pratap Vilas Palace at Lalbagh: This was originally built as the residence of the royal family. It is an extravagant mansion built in the Indo-Sarcenic style. It houses a remarkable collection of old armoury and sculptures in bronze, marble and terracotta. The palace is a riot of columns and arches drawn from a variety of traditions including South Indian, Central Indian, North Indian and Islam. The entrance has exquisite carvings as well as stuffed tigers placed on the walls. The Darbar Hall has mosaic floors, seven domes, 12 chandeliers, intricately sculpted cedar balconies and a silver throne. It is spread over an area of 720 acres with gardens and a golf course. One can visit Shastragar (weapons room) to see the Royal armoury.

Vadodara museum and art gallery and the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum: The museums boast of an excellent art collection of works by Indian artists and European Masters. Founded by the Gaekwads in 1894 A.D., the museum has an impressive collection on Art and Archaeology, Natural History, Geology and Ethnology. The adjoining art gallery has a great collection of old European Masters: Veronese, Giordano, Zurbaran, some Flemish and Dutch School paintings, Turner and Constable, a collection of Mughal miniatures and valuable palm-leaf manuscripts of Buddhist and Jain origin. (more…)

The city is on the major rail and road arteries joining Mumbai with Delhi and Mumbai with Ahmedabad. Due to this Vadodara is known as a ‘Gateway to the Golden Corridor’.

Air: Vadodara Airport (IATA: BDQ) is well connected with the cities of Mumbai and Delhi, with multiple daily flights to these locations.

Rail: Vadodara was part of historic BBCI Railway. Railway was arrived in Vadodara in early 1860s. On 5 November 1951 the BBCI Railway was merged with the Saurashtra, Rajputana and Jaipur railways to give rise to the Western Railway. Now, the Vadodara Railway Station belongs to the Western Railway division of Indian Railways and is a major station on the Mumbai-Delhi and Mumbai-Ahmedabad routes. All trains, including superfast and express, stop here.

Vadodara Railway Stations: Vadodara Junction, Makarpura & Vishwamitri Stations

Road: National Highway No. 8 passes through the city. Vadodara is also connected with Ahmedabad through Indian National Expressway 1, a stretch of 97 km Super Highway with only 2 exits.

Public transport vehicles within the city include buses, autorickshaws and taxis. There are a few private bus and taxi services as well. A significant proportion of the population uses their own vehicles – cars, scooters, motorcycles and bicycles. (more…)

As of 2001 India census, Vadodara metropolitan area had a population of 1,492,398. Males constitute 52% of the population and females 48%. Vadodara has an average literacy rate of 78%, higher than the national average of 59.5%; male literacy is 82%, and female literacy is 74%. In Vadodara, 11% of the population is under 6 years of age. Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi are the languages spoken in the city. (more…)

Vadodara has a number of newspaper publications. English-language dailies published and sold in the city are the Times of India, Indian Express,and Economic Times. There are three Gujarati dailies in the city — Sandesh, Gujarat Samachar and Divya Bhaskar.

A large number of magazines, periodicals and journals are regularly published and circulated across the city. The Gujarat film and television industry has a small but significant presence in the city. The city has four local FM stations: Radio Mirchi (98.3 MHz), Big FM (92.7 MHz), Radio City (91.1 MHz) and All India Radio (93.9 MHz).

All India Radio is broadcast on the AM band. Satellite radio was launched in nearby city of Ahmedabad by WorldSpace in 2005. Households receive television through two main cable networks, In Cablenet and Siti Cable, while DTH has little popularity in Vadodara. A network of optical fibre cables connects almost the entire city. (more…)

Cricket is by far the most popular sport in the city, as it is in the rest of the country. However, the interest in football (soccer), field hockey, volleyball, table tennis and tennis is much greater than the average Indian city.

Not only Vadodara has its own first-class cricket team that competes at the national level, but it also boasts of the oldest cricket ground in Asia, called Moti Baug (The same ground on which Mohammad Azharuddin had scored a record fastest century of 62 balls, now broken). Apart, from that there is also a private cricket ground owned by IPCL, which also hosts ODI.

Prominent cricket players from Vadodara include Atul Bedade, Vijay Hazare, Chandu Borde, Kiran More, Nayan Mongia, Anshuman Gaekwad (former coach of the Indian cricket team) and more recently Zaheer Khan, Irfan Pathan, Jacob Martin and Connor Williams. The Baroda cricket team has been a consistently good performer at the national domestic Ranji Trophy championship and has won it 6 times. (more…)