'Successive Govts Have Ruined Hyderabad's Identity'

By Dr. VINAY KUMAR | INNLIVE

Cities the world over are identified by their history, heritage and monuments.

The moment one talks of New York, the Statue of Liberty comes to mind; the identity of Paris is the Eiffel Tower, and so on.

Hyderabad is fortunate to have many such structures that reflect its historic and cultural identity. The kings of Asaf Jahi dynasty and their descendants took special interest to develop monuments, palaces, forts, lakes and gardens with a futuristic outlook.While that was their contribution, it is unfortunate that modern political rulers have been taking retrograde steps, one after the other, to undo the city's historic planning.

The city of lakes, as it was once identified, hardly has any lakes today . Of the 600 water bodies less than 10 are in existence. Worse, those left, are just a pale shadow of their original selves.

While it is true that cities need to change with time to cope with a fast-changing world, it is unfortunate that successive governments, building a so-called modern city, have systematically failed to preserve the past and in fact have destroyed it.

If the Congress government ensured the shrinking of the Himayat Sagar by allowing land grabbing in and around it, the Telugu Desam Party government did no better. With literally no lakes left for it to show its oneupmanship over its rival party , it started eyeing parks. The biggest vic tim - the Chiran Palace built over 400 acres to safeguard the biodiversity of this region.

The unique aspects of this palace and its surrounding park, apart from being home to a rich treasure of flora and fauna, is the fact that it is at the highest point of the city.On all sides of this near circular space, the city slopes down into a valley . This great engineering design makes it a ridge for the city of Hyderabad. The dense trees and foliage have ensured that the temperature of the park is always significantly lower than the rest of the city.

Hyderabad is part of the rocky Deccan Plateau which naturally makes it a heat-prone region. But the designers of the city ensured that it remained cool by planting trees along with creating water bodies. In addition to controlling the temperature, trees help control pollution, carbon emission, release fresh oxygen, and remove unhealthy carbon dioxide. Reduced rainfall and depletion of groundwater are consequences of deforestation.

Yet, the TDP under Chandrababu Naidu took over the vast expanse of land surrounding the palace, leaving around six acres to the former ruler's descendants, and reduced it significantly in size by creating roads, parking places, walkways and even auctioning a part of the land at very high price for a commercial project. The succeeding Congress contributed to further its disintegration. In fact, it even allotted a huge parcel of this precious land to the TRS party .

Now, the present government and its chief minister, who seems to have an antipathy to our heritage, has been threatening to destroy it at his own whim and fancy . He needs to understand that our heritage structures have been planned and built by our own Telengana rulers. First, it was the grand Osmania General Hospital and now it's the KBR Park that's in his firing line.

We cannot keep doing this to our natural surroundings.Already nature has started showing its hurt through vagaries of seasons. Ultimately , it will be humanity that'll suffer for its extreme interference with the ecosystem.Our interference is leading to extreme heat during summer, while the rainy season is dry . It is also purely our doing that the groundwater levels have dropped drastically today.

To add to this damage we are planning to bring down the already dwindling trees for faster, better mobility of our transport system.Where is this going to end? We brought down trees to expand our roads and highways. When that did not ease traffic, we decided to launch a metro rail. We even axed trees to make way for that.

Already the count of auto-rickshaws, cars and taxis are rise steeply in our city. The number of cars has jumped from one per family to one per member of a family! Such is the situation that there is no parking space available in homes and apartments.

So what next? Will the KBR Park now be levelled and converted into a parking lot? Trees along the walkway of KBR Park are all old ones with tremendous capacity to retain water in the soil. Suggesting translocation of these trees is akin to get ting a polar bear from Iceland and putting at the Nehru Zoological Park.

Democracy means involving citizens in projects. Till the GHMC elections, TRS was all about slum development, two bedroom houses and other such schemes. Now, it is all about these mega projects that will bring in crores worth of contracts but damage citizens' basic rights of living.

The name KBR Park given by Naidu has no relevance. There is no contribution of Kasu Brahmananda Reddy towards its planning, development or expansion. During the Telengana agitation, it was said that the Nizam's name would be linked to the park once the state was formed. KCR announced that the existing name would be removed. Or, wait, did he mean the park itself?