The city is best understood from the lane.
Not from the flyover. Not from a national newsroom eight hundred kilometres away, filing a paragraph about Gujarat between two other states. From the gully, where the shop is, where the argument is, where somebody’s brother-in-law knows what the municipal notice actually means.
That is where our name comes from, and it is the whole idea. Amdavad Gully is a publication about Ahmedabad, written from inside it.
Ahmedabad deserves better coverage than it gets
This is a city with a working memory of textile mills and a present tense full of software. India’s first UNESCO World Heritage City, where six-hundred-year-old pols sit fifteen minutes from glass offices on SG Highway. A place where a jewellery market becomes a food street after dark, and nobody thinks that is remarkable.
Cities like this usually get two kinds of coverage. Either a wire-copy version of civic decisions, filed and forgotten. Or a business-press version in which a funding round is the only thing that counts as news.
We think Ahmedabad is more interesting than both. So we do two things, properly.
We cover the city. What the corporation decided and what it will cost you. Where the roads are going. Who is building what, and who is being moved for it. Schools, hospitals, transport, rents, courts, food, festivals, the small local story that turns out to be the big one. Fast, plainly written, and specific about which neighbourhood we mean.
We cover the people building things here. Founders, operators, shopkeepers scaling into something larger, family businesses in their second generation, students who started something out of a hostel room. Not press releases with a headline on top. The actual account: what it cost, what did not work, what they would do differently. Long enough to be worth your time.
One publication, one voice, both halves of the same city.
How we work
We report, then we publish. In that order, even when it costs us the first-mover advantage. A story that is wrong and early is worth less than nothing.
We are specific. Named streets, named wards, named people, real numbers. Vagueness is usually a sign that somebody did not do the reporting.
We show our sources. Where we can name them, we do. Where we cannot, we tell you why, and we tell you what we did to verify it. Confidential sources stay confidential; that is not negotiable.
We correct in public. Errors get fixed on the article, marked, promptly. Journalism that quietly edits its mistakes away is asking you to trust something you cannot check.
Advertising does not buy coverage. Anything paid for is labelled as paid. Anything unlabelled is ours, and nobody outside this newsroom saw it before you did. Favourable coverage is not something we sell, and unflattering coverage is not something we withdraw for a fee.
We are not neutral about the city. We want Ahmedabad to work: better transport, cleaner air, functioning institutions, businesses that grow here instead of leaving.
Wanting a place to do well is not the same as flattering it. Usually it means the opposite.
Who this is for
For the person who moved here for work and still cannot tell which side of the river a decision affects. For the founder who wants to know what is actually happening in this ecosystem rather than what LinkedIn says is happening. For the family that has been in the same pol for four generations and knows more about this city than we ever will.
If you live here, work here, left here, or are thinking of coming, this is written for you.
We are early, and we would rather say so
Amdavad Gully is new. We are building it in the open, story by story, and the readers who show up now will shape what it becomes more than any plan we could write down today.
So we want to hear from you. A tip about something happening on your street. A correction. A founder story nobody has told properly. A photograph of something the rest of the city should see. A view worth arguing with.
Amdavad Gully · amdavadgully.com · Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India