Madhu Park Ridge Apartments
On Women’s Day this year, Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy stood before an audience and, in what many residents of a gated apartment complex in Langar House heard as an open threat, told them their homes would soon be worth nothing. Nobody could buy or sell a flat there, he warned. All re-registrations would be stopped. Their land would be of “zero value.”
The residents of Madhu Park Ridge, 452 families who have lived there for close to a decade, were shaken. Not because among them are some of Hyderabad’s most vocal journalists and academics, but even they had been caught off guard.
The apartment complex, spread over 6.5 acre, has been caught in the crosshairs of the state government’s Gandhi Sarovar Project, a component of the ambitious Musi Riverfront Development Project planned near Bapu Ghat. Revenue officials surveying the area told residents that part of the B Block, and three-fourths of the A Block, fall within the buffer zone of the Musi River, bringing roughly half the premises under the threat of demolition.
What followed was predictable. Protests, emotional outbursts and a political tug-of-war between the ruling Congress and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS). What was less predictable was the Chief Minister stepping into it so openly, first offering residents a land-for-land deal or monetary compensation to build a new apartment complex elsewhere, and then, in the same breath, making clear what would happen if they stayed.
The residents have not yet moved, and they say they won’t, not without a better offer and not without a fight.
“If the government comes with a better alternative, we may consider it. We are not opposing the project, as it is meant for the people. But it is displacing 452 families, which is a social crisis. Unless there is a better opportunity given to us within this area, we are not going to move from here,” B Srinivas Reddy, president of the B Block Association of Madhu Park Ridge, told Siasat.com.
The executive committee of the Madhu Park Ridge Owners’ Association is currently weighing legal options while keeping the door open for talks with the administration. There are murmurs within the complex that certain flat owners have a conflict of interest, given their proximity to the circles of power, but the majority of residents appear resolved. They will not give up their homes quietly.
Madhu Park Ridge is not the only establishment staring down an eviction notice. The Hazrat Syed Malang Shah Wali Dargah, tucked just behind the apartments, has received one too.
The dargah’s caretaker, a woman from Maharashtra who lives there with her two sons, is not an affected party in the formal sense. But she is troubled. Speaking to Siasat.com, she said the government shouldn’t trouble people who had built their dreams in those houses.
Some of the Muslims living in the apartments, she said, came to the dargah quite often. “Why disturb so many families just for a massive statue,” she said. She also offered a quieter warning: disturbing the sanctity of the dargah would not be good for whoever tried to do so.
Even as the state government pushes ahead with Phase 1 of the Musi Riverfront Development Project, critics point to what is happening on the ground, or rather, in the water, on any given day.
On Tuesday, March 10, white froth from industrial chemicals could be seen flowing continuously in the Esa River along the banks of Tapovan Park, making its way towards the Musi. The confluence of the two rivers – the Musi, also called Moosa and the Esa – happens at Bapu Ghat, the very site the Gandhi Sarovar Project is meant to beautify. It is a place of spiritual significance.
It was also, on Tuesday, receiving a steady stream of chemical-laden water.
More ironically, sewage from Madhu Park Ridge itself could be seen draining into the Esa River that day, raising pointed questions about who is complying with environmental norms and who is not.
Critics of the project argue that before Hyderabad gets a gleaming riverfront, the government must first address the domestic sewage and industrial effluent that flow freely into the Musi every single day and undertake serious de-silting of the riverbed.
Few people have studied the Musi as closely, or as stubbornly, as Dr Lubna Sarwath, an environmental and social activist and a researcher who has spent over a decade mapping the river’s boundaries, its buffers and its bureaucratic encumbrances.
She is unsparing in her assessment of the project. The state government’s plan to flush the Musi’s polluted waters by transferring water from Mallanna Sagar to Osmansagar, an intra-basin transfer, has “neither sense nor science,” she told Siasat.com.
“The Osmansagar and Himayatsagar reservoirs were designed as per the rainwater inflows coming from Ananthagiri Hills. The flood gates can’t be risked with such a transfer of water from one basin to another. A river is a dynamic body, not a flower vase that you would always keep filled,” Sarwath said.
She also raises concerns about the massive sewage trunk pipelines that form a major component of the rejuvenation plan and points to the legal requirement, under which each township is responsible for handling and cleaning its own sewage for reuse. This norm, she said, is seldom followed.
At the heart of the controversy is a number. How far from the riverbed does the buffer zone extend?
A 2012 municipal and urban development order set the buffer zone at 50 metres in municipal areas and 100 metres in non-municipal areas. In 2016-17, the then BRS government amended this, reducing the non-municipal buffer from 100 metres to 50 metres.
“So what happened to that difference of 50 metres? Is it not supposed to be government land? What is the status of the extent of all those lands in the 250-kilometre stretch of the Musi river’s flow from Ananthagiri Hills to Vadapalli,” Sarwath said.
Her Right to Information (RTI) requests seeking the KML file – the boundary memoirs of the Musi River that would include the Full-Tank Level (FTL) map demarcation – have not been fulfilled. She has appealed to the Telangana Information Commission.
Lubna’s analysis of National Remote Sensing Centre imagery raises a more fundamental question than mere buffer zone violations. She claims that Madhu Park Ridge does not merely fall within the buffer zone, it sits partly inside the Musi riverbed itself.
The above image shows Block A falling in survey number 89. Two parallel pink lines mark the revenue coordinates of the riverbed. The lower of those two lines, she says, cuts well into Block A. Measuring 49.5 metres from that boundary — the buffer zone — an orange line drawn tangentially ends close to the survey number marker, which Sarwath identifies as the outer edge of the buffer zone occupied by Block A.
Block B, to the right of Block A, is also touched by the lower pink line. When the same 49.5-metre buffer is applied, roughly 40 per cent of Block B also falls within the buffer zone, according to her calculations.
A 2016 image shows water from the Musi flowing close to Madhu Park Ridge, between the two parallel pink lines. Sarwath’s position is that most of Madhu Park Ridge falls within the buffer zone and parts of it sit within the riverbed itself.
To further prove her point, she remembers the floods in Hyderabad in 2020, when the floodwaters had entered Madhu Park Ridge. She notes that the 30-foot compound wall, which now separates the river from the complex, was built after those floods.
This is where the story becomes harder to read, and harder for the government to explain.
Revenue records from the Dharani portal show 10.30 acre of government land in survey number 90/1. If the state government is seeking to acquire 10.5 acre of private land for the Gandhi Sarovar Project, including the 6.5 acre of Madhu Park Ridge, the question is obvious. Why acquire private land at all when 10.30 acre of government land sit available in that very survey number?
And if the government is prepared to offer a land-for-land settlement to displaced residents, why can it not simply compensate them with that 10.30 acre?
There are further complications. Survey number 89/1 shows 3.08 acre of private land for which a digital signature for Non-Agricultural Land Assessment (NALA) conversion was taken on August 7, 2019. The pattadar’s name in the Dharani records is listed as “house sites/plots.”
Under survey number 90/2, there are 4.04 acre of private land recorded in the name of one Mohd Yousuf Saab, also with NALA conversion signatures from 2019. Revenue records do not classify it as Waqf land or dargah land. It appears as private land.
These details emerge from pahanis, or revenue records, spanning 2019 to 2021, accessed by Lubna Sarwath.
Meanwhile, the Wamsi portal, which had earlier recorded the Syed Shah Wali Dargah as Waqf Board land in its database and imagery, was made defunct by the Centre led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2025. The extent of land owned by the Waqf Board or the dargah as of now could not be independently verified. It is also worth noting that the dargah’s premises are currently home to the Rahmath Dairy Farm, and whether the 4.04 acre in survey 90/2 falls under the dargah’s land remains unclear.
“So where does the question of giving compensation arise?” Sarwath asked. “What is the need to spend Rs 4,700 crore in the first phase, and spend over Rs 150 crore in preparing the proposals?”
In April 2025, Sarwath was invited to a workshop attended by around 50 officials of the Musi Riverfront Development Corporation Limited. She attended. She has since filed an RTI request for the minutes of that meeting. They have not been shared with her. The preliminary report of the Musi Riverfront Development Project, she told Siasat.com, has not been disclosed either.
Chief Minister Revanth Reddy is scheduled to unveil the Detailed Project Report (DPR) of Phase 1 of the Musi Riverfront Development Project at the Taj Krishna Hotel in Hyderabad on Friday, March 13.
The 452 families of Madhu Park Ridge will be watching.
This post was last modified on March 11, 2026 8:25 am