Gandhi Nagar is one of the two earliest planned housing colonies in Kadavanthra region of Kochi city in the state of Kerala, India. It was developed by the end of the 1970s by Greater Cochin Development Authority, the statutory body overseeing the development of Kochi. What is now Gandhi Nagar was, in the 1970s, abandoned paddy fields, and wet lands. The land was developed by filling with earth from the hills of Kakkanad, and a planned housing colony was developed.
Amenities
Gandhi Nagar, being a planned housing colony has a handful of amenities which are generally uncommon for housing colonies in the state or even in Kochi. The amenities include:
In the original plan of this colony, the housing regions where divided into three based on the income group of the potential occupants, and houses were built in these regions on four different formats, for four different income groups. It may be now perceived a quite unaesthetic, or unpolitical, but these houses were, in fact, named to bear the category of these income groups. They were named: EWS, LIG, MIG, and HIG. Although the expansions of these abbreviations are now forgotten, these houses still bear these abbreviations in their house numbers. The same scheme was followed in Panampilly Nagar and Changampuzha Nagar as well. Even though the same format of housing was replication in later projects of GDCA like the South Commercial, and in Kakkanad, the income group based naming was not followed.
In popular culture
Gandhinagar 2nd Street, a 1986 Malayalam film directed by Sathyan Anthikad had name of this colony as its title. The film featured the life-style in a typical urban housing colony in Kochi in 1980s, which the rest of the state, then mostly unurbanized, perceived with a critical eye, and Gandhi Nagar was more of a stereotype for such an urban colony.
In the film In Harihar Nagar, a Malayalam film written and directed by Siddique-Lal, the writers created a fictitious housing colony out of both Gandhi Nagar and Panampilly Nagar and tried to portray the urban-life of Kochi of the 1980s. The film was shot in both these colonies.
