Rohtas: Prince Singh, 23, and his friends couldn’t stop laughing as they perched on a concrete bridge and scrolled for memes about their newly famous village, Amiyawar in Bihar’s Rohtas district.
“Look at this one!” Prince said, stopping at a meme that played on the classic Mohammed Rafi-Asha Bhosle song from Yaadon ki Baarat: “Chura liya hai tumne jo pul ko, nahar nahin churana sanam (You have stolen the bridge, don’t steal the canal, darling).”
The village has shot to national and international fame because of a rusty old metal footbridge. This crumbling piece of construction from the 1970s was undistinguished and unwanted in every way until a band of brazen bandits ‘stole’ it in broad daylight.
On the morning after April Fool’s Day, an unusually industrious group of ‘irrigation officials’ arrived at the village to dismantle the 60-foot-long and 12-foot-high eyesore that villages had long wanted to get rid of.
In just three days, between 2 and 4 April, they took down the pillars, collected several tonnes of metal, and went their merry way.
The satisfied villagers, who had admired the hard work of the sarkari karamchaari (government workers) and clicked photos of the efficient clean-up, were stunned on 6 April when local newspapers ran stories about how the “historic bridge” of Amiyawar had been “stolen”.
Now, some of these villagers too are fielding calls from journalists and YouTubers from Delhi and London.
When ThePrint visited Amiyawar on 13 April, there was a sense of both amusement and bemusement among villagers, who say the unusual heist wasn’t quite what it was made out to be in many news reports. Indeed, had old rivalries and resentments not bubbled over, it may never have come to light.
The police investigation has thrown up its own twists and turns. So far, eight people have been arrested, including an allegedly rogue assistant engineer from the Water Resources Department (WRD). The junior engineer who brought the theft to the police’s attention has also been suspended from his job, and the police are now on the lookout for the village head’s son.
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Theft followed an ‘invitation’
An hour’s drive on State Highway 15 from Rohtas district headquarters, Amiyawar is a fairly prosperous village of about 13,000 people with a small market of eateries and shops and its own higher secondary school.
The Arrah canal passes through the village, hence the need for a bridge.
The iron footbridge of newfound notoriety was built in 1972 and connected more than 10 villages to the Amiyawar village panchayat. As time passed, it did not become a “historic” landmark but merely decrepit, and a new concrete bridge was built at a distance of about 150 feet from it.
For two decades or so, the old footbridge’s only function has been as a diving board for kids jumping into the canal and as a death trap for cattle.
“Everyone wanted to get rid of it as the bodies of cattle would get stuck in the metal of the bridge and caused a hazard and stink for days,” 42-year-old Approv Sinha, whose wife Seema is the newly elected sarpanch of the village, said.
In a letter dated 24 March 2022, which ThePrint has seen, village mukhiya (head) Ram Dulari used similar terms to invite Radhe Shyam, the assistant engineer of the Water Resources Department, Rohtas, to come and take care of the footbridge.
“It is requested that the pillars of the old footbridge should be dismantled and removed as the dead bodies of cattle get stuck and the stink remains in the air for the next eight to 10 days,” the letter said.
The department received the letter on 30 March 2022. Within no time, on 2 April, more than 10 zealous workers arrived with gas cutters, pick-up van, and a JCB excavator.
“They came around 6 in the morning and worked until sunset,” 28-year-old Altaf Ansari, who lives about 500 metres from the site, said.
“For two consecutive days, they cut the pillars with gas cutters and JCB. On the third day, they started transporting the metal.”
As the men worked, Radhe Shyam — assistant engineer and recipient of the letter from the village head — was seen supervising their efforts. There was no reason to suspect anything untoward. “They said they were sarkari aadmi (government men) and we had no reason to react,” another resident, 23-year-old Afzal Hussain, said.
During the months of April, May, and June, the water in Arrah Canal is stopped, and this is also when the Water Resources Department also conducts repair work, officials confirmed.
So unremarkable was the entire exercise that the matter might have passed unnoticed had jealously and old resentments not come into play.
How the story broke
According to Rahul Mishra, a local reporter who works for multiple outlets, the former village head called newspapers to leak the story about the bridge being taken away. “On 6 April, we ran the news as a stolen bridge story. It somehow caught everyone’s attention,” he said.
However, an official from the WRD insinuated that there was resentment over the fact that the bridge had been whisked away without the usual process of tender bidding being followed, which meant that some people missed out on a potentially lucrative contract.
“All this was leaked to the local media as the persons involved in the dismantled bypassed the tender process,” the official said.
ThePrint spoke to other local reporters who said that they got wind of the story from some contractors who were miffed they hadn’t been able to take part in the tender bidding.
The standard procedure for dismantling a no-longer-useful government structure is to first form a committee that declares it as an abandoned structure. Once this is done, the committee starts the process of valuation. Based on this, a tender is issued to attract bids.
Mahendra Kumar Singh, the executive engineer of the WRD in Rohtas District, told ThePrint that a “mechanical” team from the department is generally responsible for dismantling structures like the footbridge.
In this case, of course, due process was not followed. As soon as word got out that the bridge was up for grabs, through the village head’s letter, an unofficial ‘team’ banded to get the job done. The police’s arrests so far suggest that some engineers, locals, and contractors may have colluded to make a quick buck out of the footbridge.
A rivalry between the current village head Ram Dulari, who wrote about the bridge to the WRD, and her predecessor, also played into the story, generating interest and gossip in the area, journalist Rahul Mishra said.
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Arrests, a viral video, and village head’s son on police radar
On the same day that the first story was carried in the local newspaper, a junior engineer of the Water Resources Department — Arshad Kamal Shamsi — registered a complaint at the Nasriganj Police Station. The police filed an FIR under Section 379 (punishment for theft).
Three days later, Rohtas police nabbed eight suspects and also seized one JCB excavator, a pickup van, and two gas cylinders. They also recovered 247kg of metal and Rs 3,100 in cash.
“In our initial investigation, we found out that Radhe Shyam (assistant engineer at the WRD) planned the robbery and the others conspired with him,” superintendent of police (SP), Rohtas, Ashish Bharti, said.
The others arrested include a seasonal labourer of the WRD called Arvind Kumar, pickup van owner Chandan Kumar, and scrap dealers Shiv Kalyan Bhardwaj, Manish Kumar, Sachhinand Singh, Gopal Kumar, and Chandan Kumar.
Radhe Shyam, expectedly, has been suspended from his job, but so has the main complainant in the case, Arshad Kamal Shamsi, according to WRD executive engineer Mahendra Kumar Singh. What infractions Shamsi allegedly committed are unclear.
A Special Investigation Team (SIT), headed by the SP himself, has been investigating the case.
“Other appropriate sections in the case will also be added, like 409 (criminal breach of trust by a public servant), 420 (Cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property), 411 (dishonestly receiving stolen property), and 120B (punishment of criminal conspiracy),” Nasriganj station house officer (SHO), Subhash Kumar, said.
In the meantime, a parallel drama has been playing out.
According to the Rohtas SP, the village head’s son Gandhi Chaudhary, who has 13 cases against him in Bihar and Jharkhand, was involved in the theft and is currently absconding. While on the run, he allegedly scripted a defamatory video about the police.
“To demoralise the police, Chaudhary made a staged video that the local policemen are involved in liquor smuggling,” the SP said.
The police have arrested two men who featured in the viral video, which revolves around the “home delivery” of alcohol in the area (liquor is prohibited in Bihar).
Not much of a loot
For all the trouble that the suspects took, they didn’t really stand to gain much from their bridge theft.
“The media reports have exaggerated the details,” WRD executive engineer Mahendra Kumar Singh said.
“First, they wrote 40 tonnes of metal were taken. Then, the number increased to 50, and then to 500. Our estimate is that there was a maximum of 8.5 tonnes of metal,” he added.
The SHO of Nasriganj Police Station also said that the amount of metal stolen was not as impressive as some media reports have suggested.
“The metal was transported in three pickups. We have seized one and it had 247 kg of metal (iron pillars). We are yet to trace the other two,” he said.
ThePrint checked the per kilogram rates of metal at the local market and found that it averages about Rs 40.
If indeed, the stolen metal amounted to only 8.5 tonnes (8,500 kg) and was sold at around this rate, it would yield “not more than Rs 3.5 lakh,” a scrap dealer in Dehri told ThePrint.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)