Iyer Musings No more walk in the park

I must talk in the past sense. Though the wise ones tell you to live in the present, but then the present is so bloody unpredictable and obnoxious and makes me quite shaky about my future.

Every time I took a ride around the Kasu Brahmananda Reddy (KBR) Park I would sit in silence admiring nature's abundance. Any time of the year. Any season. Anywhere you drove around the park, with a circumference of six kms.. Of course there was traffic and of course I was held up in the jams. Yes, it was frustrating sometimes, especially when the traffic jam was because there was a political office right on the main road. Next to a popular temple.

I am now told that my ride around the park will never be the same and I will not be able to drive around looking at the different flowers or the different trees, the abundance of greenery against a harsh sun or falling rain. I will miss the  glorious laburnums announcing the summer and the luscious gulmohurs distracting me from the over bright sunlight.

Is this democracy then? Where the authority of the people ruling over us does not consult us or even pretend to listen to us; or is it that our collective voice has become weak and therefore unheard. I say that because there are badgering voices, long standing legal cases, PILs against a brute force called the government and this pet project of theirs.

They, the government says, are doing it to ease the traffic, so that you reach home to your family faster everyday. But at what cost is what I ask. What is a temporary delay in reaching home (I will stand corrected here because the delays can be long) in comparison to shortchanging the public (of the future generations) by destroying the lung space we had in the middle of the city of Hyderabad. With the addendums of varied flora and fauna. And a beautiful walking space for all concerned.

Did you know that the Kasu Brahmananda Reddy Park is one of India’s two metropolitan National Parks. The other being Sanjay Gandhi Park, Mumbai.

In their story 'Hyderabad’s KBR National Park and the architecture of regulatory evasion', both Dr Donthi Narasimha Reddy, a policy researcher and Major Sandeep Khurana (Veteran), an environmentalist, make a scathing analysis in The South First. Highly technical, they concluded that the government has broken all rules and making it look like they are following all the rules .

We know the KBR Park as a forest, considering it is 400 acres of trees and bushes and shrubs. The Forest (Conservation) Act calls this as a canopy. The 1,942 mature trees which are ready for felling are apparently not on forest land but on urban approach roads.

That there exists an eco system, alive and recharging the earth and it's surroundings is not visible to the law makers and officials. And in their good will, when they say they will plant saplings, they are asking us to wait for another 20 years for almost a similar kind of cover. And sadly it won't be here, like a lung space in the middle of the city, but somewhere else.

I quote Dhonty and Khurana, when they write in The South First, "The KBR record is not a study in regulatory failure. Every regulator in the chain has done what its enabling statute required. No forestry clearance was needed. The Tree Protection Committee acted within its jurisdiction. The acquiring authority invoked an exemption that the state legislature itself enacted. The cumulative result is the structural encirclement of one of India’s two metropolitan National Parks — accomplished in the language of full compliance."

How blatant is that? While people cry themselves hoarse.

So now when I go for a drive by, I will see a concrete ring around the 400-acre forest, of which 1942 mature trees would have been lopped off,  with eight underground sumps continuously pumping out water when it gathers in the under passes. 

Protesters are opposing this Hyderabad City Innovative and Transformative Infrastructure (H-CITI) project, and this has been a decade long fight. The current protest began around 2015 against various road projects threatening the park's eco-sensitive zone.

The Citizens for the Protection of KBR National Park argue that the Eco-Sensitive Zone (ESZ) will turn the area into a "concrete graveyard".

Lalita Iyer  

Sr. journalist & blogger