What’s common to Panjagutta Junction in central Hyderabad; 100-feet road and Old Bombay Highway in western Hyderabad; Nacharam police station in eastern parts of the city and Mailardevpally in the southern parts of the city? They were all flooded over the past week due to heavy rain. Also, these roads have been built on water channels connecting lakes that have long been filled up. The key give-away was a load of sand deposited on the road by the flowing water.
“Whenever there is heavy rain, a surge of water can be seen travelling from Parvatnagar towards the 100-feet road in Ayyappa Colony, before moving towards Durgam Cheruvu,” says A. Chandra Sekhar of Kukatpally traffic police station. His office is part of the police network that sends out alerts to motorists about the traffic situation in the western parts of the city through the day and night.
Satellite images over the past two decades show how the water channel that connected Kamuni Cheruvu with Timmidkunta lake has now been buried under the road leading to the flooding.
On Tuesday evening, the traffic advisory warned people against using the road skirting the Durgam Cheruvu towards Mindspace Junction. According to environmental activists, this is the stretch of the road that has been built within the Full Tank Level (FTL) mark and some parts inside the 30-metre buffer zone. It was the same portion of the road that went underwater forcing traffic police to issue an advisory against the use of the road.
In the southern parts of the city, the blockage of water channel between Palle Cheruvu and Nawab Saheb Kunta cut off traffic flow for a few hours on the Inner Ring Road at Mailardevpally on Thursday and again on Saturday.
The Nacharam police station and the road adjacent to it sits on the water channel that brings water to Peddala Cheruvu. But it was sewage water that flooded the police station late on Tuesday night, last week. “Two years earlier, the water reached close to the police station. It caused havoc elsewhere, and traffic was closed for two days. But this year, we faced the rain fury,” said a police official at the station.
Despite frequent urban flooding affecting life, the experiment to change the topography has been going on unabated. On Monday evening, the city received nearly six centimetres of rain in a short span of time. The newest road project that slices through a rock formation near Biodiversity Junction was flooded. One Twitter user posted a video. “It’s not Niagara Falls; it’s our Raidurgam Falls connecting Raheja and Raidurgam... We can call it Raidurgam Falls of Telangana,” wrote Sridhar.
