Ahmedabad

UNESCO

Gujarat

Hubtown

It has been two years sincebecame India’s firstWorld Heritage City, but Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation seems least concerned about conservation of heritage structures only because these are not in its ‘final list’.The 400-year-old heritage gate and wall at Gita Mandir, near the bus stand being built byState Road Transport Corporation, has been demolished and nobody in the AMC has batted an eyelid yet. Such is the apathy of the AMC.The civic body had retained the structure in the ‘tentative heritage list’. Keeping this mind, the GSRTC developer had sought an information from heritage department, central zone of AMC, asking if the plot had any heritage structure.To this, AMC heritage department had replied that the structure was not in the ‘Listing and Grading of heritage structures’. In January 2018, one gate was demolished by the contractor’s company ‘’, according to sources.There was a heritage wall too which has been demolished. It is only after a citizen named Munaf Ahmed filed a complaint regarding this with the cultural minister that people came to know of the demolition of the structures.A letter dated March 22, 2018, by P K Ghosh, Chairman of Heritage Conservation Committee (AUDA), to GSRTC Vice Chairman and MD Sonal Mishra, said: “In the vicinity of the Astodia Gate, there is an old structure which happens to be in the buffer zone of the historic city. This structure, as I have gathered, was built in the Mughal period. In the British period, the area was being used as asylum for the leprosy-affected patients.”When contacted on Friday, Ghosh told Mirror, “When we came to know about the demolition of heritage wall, we sent a letter to GSRTC Authority that it falls under the buffer zone. Any new construction has to be done in such a way that its walls and gate are not damaged or demolished.”Ashish Trambadia, Director of Ahmedabad World Heritage Conservation Trust, said, “When we noticed it, we pointed out to the GSRTC via a letter that the structure was in the tentative heritage list. I am unaware about the 2017 letter.”Jitendra Radiya, Director of Hubtown Gujarat, said, “Our architect had written a letter to AMC in 2017 to which AMC replied that the said structure was not in the heritage list. Hence, in January 2018, we demolished it that too on a working day. The project we are working on is a Public Private venture. We started our work 200 meters away from the Astodia Gate. AMC had clearly mentioned in the letter that it was not in the ‘Listing and Grading of Heritage Structures’. We also took necessary permission from National Monument Authority for the construction.”