Years after a small lake was turned into a three-hole golf course abutting the Banjari Darwaja of the Golconda Fort, the city is set to lose the iconic Shah Haatim Lake to an ingenious plot to drain the water body. Historically, the lake was one of the water sources that flooded the moat of the Golconda Fort to keep besiegers at bay. Now, the fort’s moat channel is being turned into a nala that will transfer the water from the lake into the Langar Houz Lake.
The water channel hugging the fort wall is lower than the lake’s current level, and it will drain the lake. A bridge has also been built before the drainage channel is connected to the lake. “Once this channel is opened, the lake will empty and reach a lower level, and then builders will move in,” fears Muhammad Afzal, a resident and a rights activist of the area.
What a waste!
“The lake is not just being filled with garbage and building debris, but mosquito menace has reached such a state that we are afraid we may breathe in mosquitoes. To top it all, the stench is unbearable,” says Rashid Ali, who drives an auto-rickshaw for a living and sees people from the surrounding areas throw garbage into the lake from his MD Lines home.
The sprawling 64-acre lake is now ringed by a road where garbage and building debris is dumped every day shrinking it further. On the northern side, a residential colony is being built into the lake bed. The water from the Shah Haatim lake fills the moat and then drains through the Naya Qila and flows out of Deccan Park of the Golconda Fort and into the Langer Houz lake. In the late 90s, the civic body constructed another water channel to drain the water from the lake, but with little success as the gradient of the Naya Qila is higher than the lake. One of the stated reasons for the deeper water channel is to prevent flooding of Nadeem Colony and other low-lying areas.
ISBS
“We had flooding earlier and water used to bubble out of the sewerage channels earlier. But, after they laid bigger pipelines, that is no longer an issue. Now, the issue is that the lake is getting filled up,” says Syed Osman, who lives at Nadeem Colony, and works at a welding shop that abuts a small gated property where vehicles belonging to Hyderabad Golf Club move about. The Nadeem Colony was one of the worst affected areas during the August 2000 flooding when the Army had to be summoned to rescue the marooned residents. The flood recurred in 2008, and the civic officials laid fatter pipelines to drain the water.
Satellite imagery between 2003 and 2019 show the dramatic shrinkage of the lake. The historical imagery shows how the present road that skirts the lake is built into the lake bed as are the dozens of houses and residential colonies.
It remains to be seen how the transformation of a 500-year-old fort’s moat into a drainage channel affects the hydrology of the Shah Haatim lake and the neighbourhood communities.
