By the admission of GHMC Commissioner M. Dana Kishore, the area surrounding Madhapur and Serilingampally where main roads were flooded during heavy rains on Friday, is home to seven to eight major lakes.
Heavy construction activity in the area has blocked the natural ways for water to reach to the lakes, thus resulting in water-logging of the roads, he said at a press conference here on Monday.
The civic body’s storm water drainage system can handle rainwater up to 2 cm, while Serilingampally had received 11.4 cm rain on Friday.
Politician and activist Lubna Sarwat points out that the water bodies downstream of Tammidi Kunta have been totally concretised, and that several water bodies have vanished from the locality.
Conservation of rainwater
In a letter addressed to Municipal Administration and Urban Development Department, GHMC Commissioner and others, Ms. Sarwat says conservation of rainwater not only means avoiding urban flooding, but saving a crore litres of water for every centimetre of rain on every square kilometre extent. She attached satellite images of the area to point out how many lakes and water bodies have disappeared from the locality.
“Each time it rains, we squander all the rainwater without channelling, harvesting and storing them in our lakes and our ground aquifers. No care is taken to impound rainwater into water bodies,” she says, severely lambasting the civic authorities for not creating any new channels or ponds, and not clearing any encroachments on the lakes, but on the contrary, promoting and participating in concretisation of lakes and channels.