TO REVIVE A RIVER

800 MN GALLONS A DAY OF SEWAGE WATER FLOWS INTO THE MUSIIN HYDERABAD

- Amarnath K. Menon

What the Cooum is to Chennai or the Sabarmati to Ahmedabad, the Musi is to Telangana capital Hyderabad. Rising in Vikara bad, west of the city, the river travels for about 250 kilometres before it joins the Krishna at Vadapally near Suryapet in Telangana, from where it wends its way across to Andhra Pradesh, and ultimately empties itself into the Bay of Bengal.

Like most rivers in Indian cities, over the years the Musi has also become a destination for 94 per cent of the sewage water from the 54 drains in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) area—some 800 million gallons a day—and that has reduced the river to nothing more than a 20-feet-wide drain for most of its course through the city. That’s not counting the industrial waste, including chemical pollutants from the pharma industry.

Plans to cleanse the river and beautify its environs first came up 17 years ago, in 2006, in united Andhra Pradesh. Successive governments ignored the project till, post-state division, K. Chandrashekar Rao took it up in his first term as chief minister (2014-2018) by setting up the Musi River Development Corporation Limited (MRDCL) on March 25, 2017. It was meant to be the nodal agency to execute the chief minister's plan.