THE CITY GOES UNDER

Flash floods following pounding rain in mid-October (a record 320 mm in 24 hours on October 14), and sluggish relief work have dented Hyderabad’s image as a growing metropolis.

- Amarnath K. Menon

Ten days on, 185 lakes and tanks in the city were still overflowing and several residential areas remained waterlogged. The flood fury came at the end of an extended southwest monsoon season (the usual cutoff date is September 30) with water bodies already brimming. The floods took 50 lives.

A blame game is on but the truth is that the Lake Protection Committee, constituted by the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority in 2010, has come up short in fulfilling its mandate of demarcating boundaries and buffer zones of lakes; fencing them and indicating full tank level (FTL); and preventing/ reversing encroachments. Till a year ago, it had completed its task for only 224 of the city’s 3,132 water bodies. But the committee can only do so much—even where FTL boundaries were notified, authorities have consistently ignored encroachments on lake beds by unscrupulous developers conniving with politicians. A favorite strategy is to start a place of worship (which, by that token, is deemed untouchable) and then encroach farther from there. On some lake beds, both privately developed gated communities as well as state-sponsored housing for the poor have sprung up.