Hyderabad ranked fourth most polluted city in the country

HYDERABAD: Hyderabad, once known for its parks and lakes, has transitioned into the fourth most polluted city in the country.

Hyderabad earned the dubious distinction in over a few in a recent report on air quality published by an air quality tech firm. While this transition has several reasons, it has coincided with the transition from the era of bicycles and cycle rickshaws to motor vehicles. Apart from this, reports may show Hyderabad to have a good green cover, but it is misleading, say experts.

Environmentalist Dr B.V. Subba Rao said the city’s area was only 58 sq. km at one point and today it is at 6,600 sq. km, the current area under HMDA. With more areas coming under the city, the substantial green cover in the peripheral areas also got included, which boosted the overall green cover number. But there was no green cover added in the core city, Subba Rao said.

Speaking on the loss of open areas, he said that several green spaces were taken over by concrete, like a part of the public gardens as the Telugu University was constructed within the premises. While the Union government prescribes 20 square metres of per capita open space, in Hyderabad it is only 0.05 square metres.

Subba Rao said that even people were guilty of not fighting enough for open spaces.

“Only youngsters turned up to protest against the government’s move to build flyovers over KBR Park. Whereas in Türkiye, when the government wanted to destroy a central park called Gezi Park, it sparked a major nationwide movement and people actually slept in the park for months together,” he said.

One of the major contributors to the city’s pollution is vehicular emissions, and the number of vehicles have increased manifold in the past two decades. According to the historian Dr Mohammed Safiullah, earlier, it helped that cycle rickshaws were the most common modes of transport and they were non-polluting.

“They were also a source of livelihood for many people. However, because of the human effort involved in it, they have been replaced by about 1.2 lakh autorickshaws,” he said.

INTACH convenor Anuradha Reddy recalls how cycling was also much more common a few decades ago, and how she herself would cycle from Padmarao Nagar to St Ann’s College.

“On Tank Bund we had more bicycles and few cars at that time. Cycle rickshaws were used locally. We would take a tonga (horse-drawn cart) to come home from the railway station,” she recalled.