Ellisbridge

It is not the first time in the 120-year-old life term of Ellisbridge that there have been serious debates over pulling down the 480-meter long iron bridge. Six attempts were made to pull it down, but each of these attempts had fallen flat and the bridge had come out trumps defying it all. The very first attempt was made in 1973 when a proposal was moved in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) to widen the road after concerns were raised on increasing traffic in the city. This move was scuttled by a group of heritage lovers in the city. In 1979 the group even influenced a resolution to be passed in the AMC to name the stretch between Town hall and Sardarbaug as ‘Engineer Himmatlal Dhirajram Marg.’ Almost a decade later, the standing committee of the AMC brought out a plan for the construction of a new bridge in place of Ellisbridge. The plan was approved by HUDCO and a loan of Rs 5 crore was approved for the purpose. This time too an active citizen’s body which also included members of INTACH pleaded with the prime minister’s office. Several letters were also written to Rajiv Gandhi who was a senior leader in the Congress party. The appeals scuttled the move to demolish the bridge. HUDCO also withdrew the loan amount. The same year mayor Rafiuddin Sheikh proposed to build a new bridge on a new loan and then build shops underneath the bridge to pay the installments. STUP consultants had even submitted a plan for the new bridge. But Sheikh died that year. In 1986, it was decided for the first time that the Ellisbridge would stand and two new bridges will come alongside it. This led to another round of uproar when Amadavdis realized that nearly one third of the Manek Burj, the founding bastion of the city will be damaged in the bridge expansion. “It was in 1987 that AMC decided to preserve Ellisbridge as it is and two years later declared the bridge’s boundary, the Manek Burj and a natural waterway near the bridge as protected sites. This was mandatory for procuring a no objection certificate (NOC) from the Archeological Survey of India (ASI). It was only after this NOC that the AMC decided to built two new bridges on either side of Ellisbridge,” claims Vandana Engineer in her book ‘Rao Bahadur Himmatlal Dhirajram—The Man behind the Bridge’. Vandana is the great grand daughter-in-law of Himmatlal Engineer and now settled in Houston in US.