Hyderabad: Social activist Dr Lubna Sarwath on Thursday, March 5, urged Telangana Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy not to inaugurate what she termed the “fraud, destruction and wastage of public money” carried out by the Hyderabad Disaster Response and Asset Protection Agency (HYDRAA) in its restoration of the historic Bum-Rukn-Ud-Dowla lake.
The Chief Minister is scheduled to inaugurate the restored lake at 7.30 pm on Sunday, March 8.
Citing articles quoting author Dr Mansee Bal Bhargava, as well as Bhargava’s own YouTube clips commenting on the lake’s restoration, Sarwath said that despite HYDRAA having invited Bhargava to conduct a workshop in July 2024, all her guidelines had since been discarded, “just as it had dumped Bum Rukn ud Dowla and other lakes in Hyderabad.”
“In October 2024, during a workshop with HYDRAA officials, the emphasis was placed on what not to do with urban lakes, reiterating a simple but often ignored principle: a lake is a lake. It must not be reimagined as a park, a garden or a real estate opportunity. Misunderstanding its ecological identity inevitably misguides its management,” Sarwath said, quoting Bhargava’s observations and guidelines on lake restoration.
Pointing to the historic structures associated with several lakes — including bunds, pavilions and sluice gates — Sarwath underscored the importance of drawing lessons from the development of Hussainsagar lake and avoiding similar mistakes.
“Rukn-ud-Daula lake, or Bum-Rukn-ud-Dowla, and Neher-e-Hussain must be considered rich natural-cultural heritage and protected as per the Archaeological Survey of India’s rules and guidelines. Any construction inside the lake premises must be discouraged except for maintenance. The ASI requires an institutional framework for designating these lakes as heritage structures,” she said.
Sarwath said that protecting a lake only to develop it further as a park, parking facility or any other purpose, while reducing the lake area and compromising its ecosystem, could not be considered protection, as it only degraded the lake further. She cited the development of Hussainsagar, Durgam Cheruvu and Saroornagar lakes as examples.
“Unless lakes are restored to their ecological identity rather than being repackaged as recreational real estate, the city risks losing both its environmental resilience and its historical wisdom,” she cautioned, describing the erosion of Hyderabad’s lakes as not merely a technical failure, but a governance failure rooted in misunderstanding.
Sarwath also urged the Chief Minister to remove HYDRAA Commissioner AV Ranganath from his post, or at the very least strip him of decision-making powers while limiting HYDRAA’s role to project execution.
“While HYDRAA has no ‘beautification’ mandate, Mr. Ranganath is going beyond his legal ambit, granting contracts, concretising lake areas and destroying the very structures and bunds of the lakes. He has proved himself as working in a real estate, capitalist, corrupt and opaque mode, and not in an ecology-people-law mode,” she alleged.
She called for the formation of an expert committee to conduct a social and economic audit of all activities undertaken by HYDRAA, particularly at Bum-Rukn-Ud-Dowla lake, which she claimed had become “a gift to encroachers to increase their real estate value.”
Urging the Chief Minister to treat her appeals as a matter of urgency and halt what she described as the legitimisation of alleged fraud by HYDRAA, Sarwath also invoked the words of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had warned at the Stockholm Conference in 1972: “We do not want to impoverish the environment any more than we want to impoverish our people.”
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