Shambhudan Gadhvi is a former master clerk and amateur geologist from Gujarat who discovered the Indus valley site of Dholavira in the early 1960s.
[1][2] During the Kutch famine in 1960s, Shambhudan Gadhvi was supervising on a drought relief work at Kotda (1 km (0.62 mi) from the Dholavira site) when he found Harappan seals with the shape of animals.
[3][4][5][6] While supervising the digging of a small dam to collect the monsoon waters, he discovered numerous artifacts; prominent among them were fragments of Indus seals.
He recognized that the seals belonged to the Harappan civilization by comparing it to the pictures that he found in his son's history textbook issued by the Gujarat government.
Gadhvi has been an important collaborator with RS Bisht in the late 1980s, when extensive exploration work was underway in the area to map the settlement of Khadir Island, where Dholavira is located.