A textile baron, an energy crisis and a dream: How an ambitious proposal to connect Ahmedabad and Khambhat was dismantled

Influential businessmen from Ahmedabad, Kheda, Vadodara, Bharuch and Surat had backed this proposal. Apart from Chhotalal, who was also the municipal president, leading industrialists like Sarabhai Maganbhai Karamchand and Lalbhai Dalpatbhai were a part of the company’s board of directors.

Chottalal was inspired to set up the company due to Ahmedabad’s energy crisis at the time. By the 1890s, Ahmedabad had earned a reputation as the “Manchester of the East” with 14 operational cotton mills dominating its landscape. The mills were voracious consumers of fuel, but local firewood supplies were becoming “dearer day by day,” and the costs of importing coal via Bombay, Baroda, and Central India (B.B. & C.I.) Railways were prohibitive.

The company proposed a radical solution: a 99-year monopoly to dredge and navigate the Sabarmati, promising to reduce freight costs from the railway’s rate of Rs. 12 per ton to a mere Rs. 8 via water. The project was decisively rejected by the Government of Bombay in April 1895 with the proposal being dismissed as “utterly wild,” “visionary,” and “impracticable” in official records dug out by Kadri.

Kadri collected material from the archives of the revenue department records, legal opinions, and such other sources to trace how the project was “dismantled”. The book annexes copies of original records with signatures and notes of officials of the time tracing the city’s intimate link with the river.

The Dholera Special Investment Region announced by PM Narendra Modi when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat is said to have been inspired by this chapter of history, said Kadri.