Ahmedabad's heritage entry gets unhinged

Ahmedabad: On Tuesday morning, the large spiked wooden gate of the Kalupur Darwaza, collapsed with a loud bang.
The crumbling embarrassment comes barely three months before Unesco's expert team is to visit Ahmedabad's walled city for inspecting whether we deserve a world heritage tag, or not. Before the dust over the Kalupur Darwaza incident could settle, reports of a pol house collapsing in Dwarkadhish ni pol near Anjuman school arrived.
Fire department personnel rushed to spot and rescued an 80-year-old woman. Our apathy towards our own past clearly finds expression in the Kalupur Darwaza incident.
The constant exposure to vehicular traffic that passes right through the darwaza causing vibrations had led the spiked wooden gate to snap off the main structure over time.
Thankfully, unlike the Khanpur Darwaza, where a large chunk of the Darwaza collapsed, killing one person in October last year, nothing untoward happened in Tuesday's incident.
Except, perhaps, the highlighting of the neglect of heritage by authorities responsible for them.
A senior Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) official said, "Apart from Kalupur Darwaza, there are a few other gates in the city which are open for traffic and face the same problem.
Moreover, surfacing and re-surfacing of the road near the spot has also affected its foundations."
The officials said that full assessment of the monument would be taken up in a couple of days by a ASI team from Vadodara.
In a recent research civil engineering students of LD Engineering, Piyush Basekar, Devang Vaghela and Mehul Katakiya, who were measuring affect vehicular vibrations using a specialized instrument on Siddi Syed, Astodia, Raipur and Delhi darwazas and Usmanpura tomb, found that vehicle contact with irregularities on road surface - potholes, cracks and uneven manhole covers - induced dynamic loads on the pavement.
These loads generated stress waves, which propagated in the soil, eventually reaching the foundations of heritage buildings.
The vibrations were at the rate of 0.12 inches per second and were causing gradual damage.
Conservation architect Ashish Trambadia is concerned with the horizontal pressure of multistoried buildings on Khanpur fortwall - now being restored by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC).
"This wall may not be able to take more pressure, as the buildings are elevated 20 feet above road surface and exert a pressure on the wall. A strengthening of the wall will be required," he said.