Hyderabad rains: Afzal Sagar erased, flash floods now fill the void

At Arjun’s residence in Manggarodi Basti of Nampally, his spouse Shakuntala cradles their months-old child and stares on the darkish, dirty nook that when served because the household’s seating and wash space. The house now bears solely silence. “He simply slipped and disappeared,” says neighbour Pujari Lal, talking for the household nonetheless too shocked to seek out phrases. “We weren’t even conscious of it. The CCTV footage from a close-by home confirmed us what occurred,” provides Arjun’s aunt, Anjamma. 

Forty-eight hours for the reason that incident, the physique of the 26-year-old stays untraced. Officials from the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation have solely swiftly wedged a metal grille throughout the trail to the nala.

The home itself sits precariously near the nala, with solely a makeshift bridge of picket planks connecting it to the road. On that night time, it wasn’t the nala flooding that consumed Arjun. Eyewitnesses and the lay of the land level as a substitute to an accident ready to happen. “The streets get flooded incessantly. It was nothing new. But this time, with the drains clogged, the water flowed unchecked over the bottom from Asif Nagar, from close to Rehan Hospital, down the lane of Dr. Mehmood Hospital,” says Mohammed Manzoor, who lives close by and noticed the flooding unfold.

The geography of neglect is etched into the locality. This very stretch had a large sewage canal which drained from close to the Mallepally Masjid all the best way all the way down to the River Musi. Now, the circulate merely disappears into the Goshamahal space.

“Paani yahan tak aaya (the water got here until right here),” says an area feminine resident, exhibiting a chest-high mark on a home constructed on excessive plinth. The house is on the finish of the road. Once the wall of water hit her residence, it swirled and raced down the road with such ferocity that two males  — Arjun and Rama, 25, have been swept away.

Yards away from the nala swarming with personnel from DRF, HYDRAA and GHMC is the Afzal Sagar Katta Maisamma Temple. Near the temple there aren’t any relics of the lake. “Yahan poora paani tha aur 1978 me plotting ho gayi (This space was all water. It was plotted out for homes in 1978),” says Rehman, a resident of Afzal Sagar.

The Hyderabad Municipal Survey map of 1914 exhibits an enormous lake bounded by Afzal Sagar Tank Bund Road. After the 1911 plague that originated in Nampally space, a few of the smaller ponds and lakes have been crammed up for housing by the City Improvement Board. In 1941, the realm between Jama Masjid and the Afzal Sagar lake was used to construct the CIB properties. Now whereas the CIB properties stay dry, encroachments that cropped up on the dried mattress of the Afzal Sagar lake confronted flood fury.

“There was one other large flood in September 1970 which washed away various individuals in Habeeb Nagar space. Many old-time residents keep in mind the hearsay of ‘Paani aaya bhago’. Unless there’s civic planning concerned, we are going to see these sort of disasters,” says Sajjad Shahid of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage.