859 missing graveyards rediscovered

Hyderabad: The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation has managed to identify 859 graveyards belonging to various communities and religions after verifying the estate properties.

Officials claimed that the lack of co-ordination between the estate and maintenance wings had led to the disappearance of over 1,600 graveyards in the city. The corporation would embark on a programme to recover the graveyards from encroachers.

The records of the estate wing says that there are over 2,500 graveyards in the erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) areas, not to mention the nine surrounding municipalities that were later merged to form the GHMC.

However, due to apathy, several graveyards belonging to different communities and religions have 'disappeared', leaving little space to bury or cremate the dead.

The field staff at the circle level, in cahoots with the encroachers, ignored the graveyards being illegally taken over.

Asked about this, an estate wing official said that the GHMC did not have any concrete report about graveyards. He agreed that there were over 2,500 graveyards till 2007 prior to the merger of the peripheral municipalities.

On the other hand, the maintenance wing officials argued that they only look after the upkeep of graveyards which were handed over by the estate wing.

Surprisingly, despite Chief Minister, K. Chandrasekhar Rao's, instruction to develop 50 model graveyards in 50 days way back in 2015, the maintenance could only complete 20 of them till date.

The corporation has identified 106 graveyards in the L.B. Nagar zone, 232 in Charminar, 205 in Khairatabad, 88 in Serilingampally, 143 in Kukatpally zone among others. When asked about the community and religion-wise graveyard data, the official said, “The country has been already divided in to communities and religions. GHMC will not do the same.”