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

At Arjun’s home in Manggarodi Basti of Nampally, his wife Shakuntala cradles their months-old baby and stares at the dark, grimy corner that once served as the family’s seating and wash area. The space now bears only silence. “He just slipped and disappeared,” says neighbour Pujari Lal, speaking for the family still too stunned to find words. “We were not even aware of it. The CCTV footage from a nearby house showed us what happened,” adds Arjun’s aunt, Anjamma. 

Forty-eight hours since the incident, the body of the 26-year-old remains untraced. Officials from the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation have only hastily wedged a steel grille across the path to the nala.

The house itself sits precariously close to the nala, with only a makeshift bridge of wooden planks connecting it to the street. On that night, it wasn’t the nala flooding that consumed Arjun. Eyewitnesses and the lay of the land point instead to an accident waiting to take place. “The streets get flooded frequently. It was nothing new. But this time, with the drains clogged, the water flowed unchecked over the ground from Asif Nagar, from near Rehan Hospital, down the lane of Dr. Mehmood Hospital,” says Mohammed Manzoor, who lives nearby and saw the flooding unfold.

The geography of neglect is etched into the locality. This very stretch had a wide sewage canal which drained from near the Mallepally Masjid all the way down to the River Musi. Now, the flow simply disappears into the Goshamahal area.

“Paani yahan tak aaya (the water came till here),” says a local female resident, showing a chest-high mark on a house built on high plinth. The home is at the end of the street. Once the wall of water hit her home, it swirled and raced down the street with such ferocity that two men  — Arjun and Rama, 25, were 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 are no relics of the lake. “Yahan poora paani tha aur 1978 me plotting ho gayi (This area was all water. It was plotted out for houses in 1978),” says Rehman, a resident of Afzal Sagar.

The Hyderabad Municipal Survey map of 1914 shows a vast lake bounded by Afzal Sagar Tank Bund Road. After the 1911 plague that originated in Nampally area, some of the smaller ponds and lakes were filled up for housing by the City Improvement Board. In 1941, the area between Jama Masjid and the Afzal Sagar lake was used to build the CIB homes. Now while the CIB homes remain dry, encroachments that cropped up on the dried bed of the Afzal Sagar lake faced flood fury.

“There was another big flood in September 1970 which washed away a number of people in Habeeb Nagar area. Many old-time residents remember the rumour of ‘Paani aaya bhago’. Unless there is civic planning involved, we will see these kind of disasters,” says Sajjad Shahid of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage.