The river Musi passes through the city of Hyderabad (Deccan) and divides it into two parts. On the 28th September 1908, a cyclonic flood of unusual intensity passed through the middle of this city. The rainfall recorded at Shamshabad, one of the principal rain-gauge stations in the catchment area, was 12.8 inches in 24 hours and 18.90 inches in 48 hours. This fall resulted in the most destructive flood that had been witnessed in Hyderabad City for over three-quarters of a century. The northern bank of the river was on a lower level than the southern one. The river basin above the city abounded in small tanks, there being 788 tanks in a basin of 860 square miles, roughly at the rate of one tank for every square mile of catchment. The valley of the Musi River which caused this flood consisted of two rainfall basins — the Musi proper with a catchment of 285 square miles and the Easi with one of 525 square miles. From the levels marked by the flood it was calculated that the discharge began with 1 10,000 cusecs and rose to a maximum of 425,000 cusecs. In the valleys of these rivers every tank of any consequence gave way. In all 221 tanks are reported to have breached, of which 182 were in the Easi catchment and 39 in the Musi. It was at this period that the Government of Hyderabad wanted an engineer to examine the damage done and to suggest measures to prevent a recurrence of such catastrophes.
The above extract taken from “Memoirs of my working life”, the autobiography of Mokshagundam Visvesvarayya describes the context in which his services were sought by the Hyderabad state in 1909. It captures the essence of surface water in Hyderabad and the broader region in which it is embedded. A hundred years later, the Telangana state still has more than 9000 tanks, while the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority’s planning area of over 7000 square kilometers holds nearly 4000 tanks.
The difficulty however, is that in the metropolitan area, most of these tanks have lost their agrarian function. With no land reserved for sewerage treatment plants in the master plan, the only place where an STP can be located now is the nearest water body. Even this in practice turns out to be a slow disaster because the planned capacity of these plants is nowhere near the actual requirement which increases by leaps and bounds with new multistoried builds coming up within the catchment. Both their command areas and foreshores have been turned into real estate.
Over the last two decades there have been several initiatives to rejuvenate water bodies in Hyderabad. However, the dominant view of the planners and implementing authorities is to turn these water bodies into tourist attractions without re-engineering them away from their original agricultural functions.
The river Musi passes through the city of Hyderabad (Deccan) and divides it into two parts. On the 28th September 1908, a cyclonic flood of unusual intensity passed through the middle of this city. The rainfall recorded at Shamshabad, one of the principal rain-gauge stations in the catchment area, was 12.8 inches in 24 hours and 18.90 inches in 48 hours. This fall resulted in the most destructive flood that had been witnessed in Hyderabad City for over three-quarters of a century. The northern bank of the river was on a lower level than the southern one. The river basin above the city abounded in s
sses through the city of Hyderabad (Deccan) and divides it into two parts. On the 28th September 1908, a cyclonic flood of unusual intensity passed through the middle of this city. The rainfall recorded at Shamshabad, one of the principal rain-gauge stations in the catchment area, was 12.8 inches in 24 hours and 18.90 inches in 48 hours. This fall resulted in the most destructive flood that had been witnessed in Hyderabad City for over three-quarters of a century. The northern bank of the river was on a lower level than the southern one. The river basin above the city abounded in s
