Restoration of 105-year-old Doddajala heritage railway station in Bengaluru gets underway

BENGALURU: The restoration of the 105-year-old Doddajala heritage railway station in Bengaluru Division has been kickstarted. Four railway stations are set to be restored for the division by the Indian National Trust for Art & Cultural Heritage (INTACH), a non-profit associated with the Archeological Survey of India.

Ashok Kumar Verma, Bengaluru Divisional Railway Manager, laid the foundation stone on Monday (July 12) to start the restoration work. “An Art Centre-cum-Cultural Centre-cum Conventional Centre will be developed at Doddajala,” said an official release. This is in light of an MoU signed on February 25, 2021 to restore and preserve heritage railway stations at Doddajala, Devanahalli, Avatihalli and Nandi Halt based on different themes related to history and heritage, it added.

The stations are located on the Bengaluru-Chikkaballapur light railway line, a metre gauge one opened on August 1, 1915. “This is one of the region's oldest railway lines. These buildings are quaint examples of colonial style architecture located in a picturesque stretch,” it said.  

The release said that an interpretation centre for monuments and history as well as a cafe or snack counter will be set up at Devanahalli while a silk museum and resource centre along with a park, with appropriate tree planting and landscaping will be put in place at Avathihalli. A rail museum, cafe, restaurant, cultural performance centre, pop-up weekend craft markets, interpretation centre, open air theatre and amphitheatre will come up at Nandi Halt Station.

The work will be done in two steps. In the first stage, INTACH will undertake the renovation, restoration and preservation of the station buildings in consultation with the railways and identify the partners under CSR for funding the initiative. In the second stage, ways and means of sustainable maintenance of preserved and restored buildings will be developed by creating additional amenities at the stations and surroundings.

Kusuma Hariprasad, Additional Divisional Railway manager (Admin), S Pervesh Kumar, Sr. Divisional Engineer (Co-ordination) and Jayant Ramachandran, Senior Divisional Mechanical Engineer, were present on the occasion. Meera Iyer, Convenor of INTACH, Co-convenor C Arvind as well as conservation architect Pankaj Modi were also present.