A Kasaragod village remembers the 'Bridge Man' of India for the one bridge he did not build

Kasaragod: Every weekday begins with a detour for Prashanth Nerolu. The schoolteacher leaves his home at Nerolu, a tiny settlement in Adkasthala in Kasaragod's border panchayat of Enmakaje, at 7 am to reach his school at Bantwal in Dakshina Kannada by 9 am.

The state highway that would take him there lies barely two minutes from his house. But between his village and the highway flows the Shiriya river.

Without a bridge, Prashanth first drives along a muddy road for nearly half an hour just to reach the highway, where he boards a bus for the rest of his journey. "I have a car. Imagine the schoolchildren and college students who have to make this journey every day," he said.

His struggle is shared by nearly 100 families living in the neighbouring hamlets of Nerolu, Gurinerolu and Manjalagiri. For more than three decades, they have been waiting for a suspension bridge connecting them to Gadi, where the state highway passes.

For years, their hope had a name. Girish Bharadwaj.

Across Karnataka, Bharadwaj was known as the 'Bridge Man', the engineer who built low-cost hanging bridges where governments saw only difficult terrain and expensive projects. He died at a private hospital in his hometown of Sullia on Tuesday. He was 76.

His death has left behind hundreds of bridges across rural India, mostly in Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Odisha.

Whenever the people of Adkasthala heard of another suspension bridge coming up under Bharadwaj's guidance, they wondered if he would one day build one for them. He had built one in Adoor in the neighbouring Delampady panchayat. In 2015, when Bharadwaj was supervising the construction of the Panjikkal suspension bridge across the Payaswini river in Delampady, people from Adkasthala travelled there simply to watch it take shape. "I went there thrice. He built the bridge in three months," said Prashanth.

The Adkasthala proposal has been moving between government offices since 2010. "Dr Bharadwaj came here three times to study the terrain and prepare estimates. But the project never received government sanction."

On Tuesday, as news of Bharadwaj's death spread, many in Adkasthala felt that a dream they had nurtured for decades had quietly slipped further away. It was precisely this kind of despair that Bharadwaj's life's work solved.

Bharadwaj did not begin his career as a bridge builder. He graduated as a mechanical engineer from PES College, Mandya. He was nearing 40 in 1989, when residents of Aramburu approached him with an unusual request: build them a bridge.

At first, he laughed. They were asking a mechanical engineer to do what was traditionally the work of civil engineers. But when he understood how children, farmers and patients were risking their lives to cross the river every day, he accepted the challenge. With the help of his friends, who were engineers, and supported by public contributions, he built the bridge.

That project transformed not only the village, but also Bharadwaj's life. He first established Rational Engineering Works in Sullia, his hometown, before starting Ayashila Industries, which built the suspension bridges. His team of about 30 workers typically completed three bridges a year, each spanning around 100 metres. Over time, he refined the design to reduce costs while improving strength and safety.

His bridges dramatically shortened journeys to schools and hospitals, connected isolated farming communities to markets and gave remote villages year-round access to the outside world.

Among the many bridges he built was one at Mandikolu, the native village of former Union minister and former Karnataka chief minister D V Sadananda Gowda.

People in rural Karnataka revered him. They called him the 'Visvesvaraya of Sullia'.

In 2017, the Union government honoured him with the Padma Shri for his contribution to rural connectivity. The happiness of the people who benefited from his bridges kept him content and going.

During his interaction with reporters, he often worried that engineering education had drifted away from solving ordinary people's problems.

No engineering student had come to learn the skill of building cost-effective and sturdy suspension bridges, he once remarked.

Tributes poured in after his death
In his condolence message, Karnataka Chief Minister D K Shivakumar said Bharadwaj had built more than 140 suspension bridges connecting remote and hilly villages across the country, making life easier for thousands of people. "With his demise, the state has lost a rare technical visionary and innovator," he said, adding that grateful people fondly called him the "Visvesvaraya of Sullia."

Health Minister and Dakshina Kannada district in-charge U T Khader recalled working with Bharadwaj on plans for another suspension bridge in Ullal and said his contribution to engineering would remain unforgettable.

The Karnataka government accorded Bharadwaj full state honours at his funeral in Sullia on Tuesday. Officials, engineers, public representatives and thousands of admirers gathered to bid farewell to the man who spent a lifetime connecting villages that geography had kept apart.

But in one Kasaragod village, the 'Bridge Man' will be remembered for the bridge he could not build.