Apathy of administrators and enforcers, greed of encroachers coupled with ignorance towards pollution has been the bane of water bodies that once abounded the city and its surroundings. There remains very little authentic information and data as to how many lakes still exist and what is their present condition.
Neither size or boundary nor the quality of water in most of these lakes is known. It is in this backdrop, the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority (HMDA) which took up protection, restoration and conservation of lakes listed out 325 water bodies and sought to classify them with available details.
The project has been envisaged to cover these lakes spread out in different parts of the HMDA’s 1,214 square km jurisdiction. For most of them, the basic full tank level boundaries and buffer areas are not available and the exercise is to start with this in consultation with the irrigation and the revenue departments.
According to the HMDA, the 325 lakes have been divided as those up to 10 hectares (150 lakes), from 10 hectares to 25 hectares (110), between 25 hectares to 50 hectares (50) and 15 lakes spread over 50 hectares.
Visits
Visits to all the identified lakes will be carried out for enumeration with location and size, and a record of each lake with details prepared. Various data sources including Survey of India topo sheets, Google maps and basin maps will be used for mapping and for coming up with a base map for them.
Satellite imageries from National Remote Sensing Agency for three different time periods i.e., 1990, 2000 and 2012 are to be analysed to document the change of physical existence, lake water spread and encroachments. For the purpose of analysing the waste water entering these lakes, a total of 24 parameters are proposed to be checked including odour, pH, Nitrite, Arsenic, Mercury, Lead, Selenium and Cyanide.
