What to expect
Highlights
- The swaying pedestrian suspension bridge.
- Mangroves, backwater and coconut-grove scenery.
- A quiet, local sunset-hour spot.
The story
A 280-foot footbridge slung across a tidal river by army engineering cadets in eleven days of January 1991, built to last five years. It is still there, thirty-five years on, and the islanders it was built for now share it with everyone who has seen it on a phone.
The story of Kemmannu Hanging Bridge
Kemmannu sits about 8 km north of Udupi town, where the Suvarna river spreads out into a shallow tidal maze before reaching the sea. In that spread are river islands — kudru in Tulu and Kannada — and two of them, Padukudru and Thimman Kudru, are inhabited. Until 1991 the only way on or off them was a boat. Not a ferry on a timetable: a boat, and whoever was rowing it.
What changed that is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. The bridge was not built by a contractor or a public works department. It was built by cadets of the 2 and 4 Karnataka Engineering Company during their annual training camp, between 16 and 27 January 1991 — eleven days. A stone slab at the foot of the bridge names it Deepak. The span is about 280 feet, and its design life was five years.
That last figure is the one everything else follows from. A five-year structure that is still carrying people in its thirty-fifth year has been living on repairs and goodwill for three decades, and the record of those repairs is thin. The one substantial intervention on record came in 2015, funded with about ₹10 lakh credited to the Rajya Sabha member Oscar Fernandes and the then MLA Pramod Madhwaraj. After that, by the local reporting, nothing for years.
Meanwhile the bridge changed jobs. A road bridge was built for vehicles, so the islanders no longer depend on the crossing to get their shopping home, and the hanging bridge became a thing people drive to Kemmannu specifically to walk on. That is a nicer problem than the one it replaced, but it is still a problem: a footbridge designed for a handful of villagers at a time now takes coach parties.
By November 2022 the local press was describing the state of it directly. The bridge is meant to hold fifteen to thirty people at once; more than a hundred had been seen standing on it together. The cement planks had gone weak and some were broken. One of the two main ropes had snapped and been temporarily repaired, and the deck had tilted to one side afterwards. The safety rails on both sides were broken.
What made that reporting land was timing. The Morbi suspension-bridge collapse in Gujarat happened on 30 October 2022 and killed well over a hundred people, and the questions being asked of every hanging bridge in India that month were not rhetorical. The Thonse gram panchayat closed this one to the public.
Read the full history of Kemmannu Hanging Bridge 581 more words
History
Built by cadets of the 2 and 4 Karnataka Engineering Company during their annual training camp, 16–27 January 1991, to connect Padukudru and Thimman Kudru near Kemmannu in Udupi district. About 280 feet long. Named Deepak, per the stone slab at its foot. Design life: five years.
Restored in 2015 at a cost of about ₹10 lakh, credited locally to the Rajya Sabha member Oscar Fernandes, who died in 2021, and to Pramod Madhwaraj, then the Udupi MLA. Local reporting in 2022 stated that no maintenance had been carried out since.
Closed to the public by the Thonse gram panchayat after the Morbi collapse of 30 October 2022, on the ground that it was dilapidated and dangerous to walk on. A Daijiworld report of 2 November 2022 set out the condition in detail: broken planks, a main rope that had already snapped once, broken side rails, a tilted deck, and crowd loads several times the safe figure.
On 25 February 2023 the district administration announced a repair, estimated at about ₹50 lakh, to be carried out by the Udupi wing of Cochin Shipyard, which operates from Malpe fish port. The inspecting party named in that report was the panchayat raj engineer Srinath, the Cochin Shipyard manager Shashikant Kotian, the civil engineer Girish Bharadwaj — who is known across coastal Karnataka for exactly this kind of suspension footbridge — and representatives of the Bharat Nirman team. That report also revised the safe capacity downward, to at most fifteen to twenty people at a time.
⚠ We could not confirm from a source we trust what happened after February 2023. Several pages and search summaries state that a renovated bridge was inaugurated on 14 October, some giving 2023 and crediting "local MLA Pramod Madhwaraj" — but Madhwaraj had not been the sitting MLA since 2018, which makes that attribution look like an older inauguration report being re-dated. Rather than publish a reopening we cannot stand behind: the last thing we can verify is a ₹50 lakh repair announced in February 2023 for a bridge that was closed at the time. Check locally before you plan a trip around walking across it.
Why visit
Go for the crossing itself, if it is open. A narrow plank deck on steel rope over a tidal river, with mangrove and coconut on both banks, is a genuinely good five minutes — and it moves under you, which is most of the point and also most of the reason it needs to be respected.
Go for the islands rather than only the bridge. Padukudru and Thimman Kudru are working places, not attractions: houses, coconut, boats, a Ganapati temple on Padukudru. The interesting thing about the bridge is what it is for, and you only see that by walking to the other end and looking around.
Go early, and go on a weekday. Everything in the safety record of this bridge is a crowding story — a footbridge rated for fifteen to thirty people taking a hundred, on a deck already carrying broken planks. Sunset on a weekend is precisely the wrong time, both for the photograph you came for and for the structure.
And treat it as part of the coast rather than a destination on its own. It is about 8 km from Udupi town, close to Malpe and St Mary’s Island, and it takes twenty minutes to see properly. Building a day around it will disappoint; adding it to a day already spent on this coast will not.
