Hyderabad: The Supreme Court on Monday, April 27, dismissed the Telangana government’s appeal in the Bathukamma Kunta land dispute, leaving intact the Telangana High Court’s order directing the Hyderabad Disaster Response and Asset Protection Agency (HYDRAA) to remove structures it had built on the contested land in Bagh Amberpet.
The case pits Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leader Edla Sudhakar Reddy against HYDRAA and has been working its way through the courts for over two years. Sudhakar Reddy claims that seven acre of Bathukamma Kunta is his private property, while HYDRAA maintains it is government land – a lake – and has been pushing to restore it.
The dispute has a long paper trail. On January 10, 2025, Sudhakar Reddy filed a civil suit in a lower court claiming the land was private property. The City Civil Court dismissed it on April 22, 2025. Meanwhile, on February 18, 2025, HYDRAA had already begun restoration work, and notably, digging just a few feet into the land had caused water to gush out, bolstering the agency’s claim that it was indeed a water body.
However, HYDRAA did not stop at restoration. After winning in the City Civil Court, the agency constructed children’s parks, an open gym, gates, fencing, signboards and rerouted drain water away from the lake, which had by then become a sewage pond. This is where it ran into trouble. The High Court had issued a status quo order on March 17, 2025, and HYDRAA had ignored it. On June 12, 2025, the court directed HYDRAA to remove the structures it had put up in violation of that order.
The confrontation came to a head on March 23 this year, when the Telangana High Court held HYDRAA Commissioner AV Ranganath in contempt, holding him personally responsible. The court directed him to remove all structures, markers, walls, gates and signages erected on the seven acre within four weeks, and to restore the land to its original state, including removing anything that indicated HYDRAA’s ownership or suggested the land was a public facility under its control.
HYDRAA then approached the Supreme Court, which declined to intervene, noting that with the matter still pending before the High Court, the apex court could not pass an order.
According to records from 1962-63, Bathukamma Kunta in survey number 563 originally spread across 14.06 acre, with the total extent including the buffer zone at 16.13 acre. Decades of encroachment have reduced it to just 5.15 acre today.
| Posted by Vivek Bhoomi | | 
