Gandhi Nagar is one of the two earliest (the other being Panampilly Nagar) planned housing colonies in Kadavanthra region of Kochi city in the state of Kerala, India.[1] 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.
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:
Even though Gandhi Nagar, Kadavanthra is a planned housing colony, being in the heart of the city of Kochi, it is home for certain government organizations such as:
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 (Economically Weak Section), LIG (Lower Income Group), MIG (Middle Income Group), and HIG (High Income Group). 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 (KSHB) 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.