HYDERABAD: The rains that swelled the Musi this season have reopened questions Hyderabad has long sidestepped. The river that once saw the 1908 floods proved again that it is alive and claims stretches of land walled off by concrete and culverts. As B.V. Subba Rao, former chief engineer in the irrigation department, who has studied Hyderabad’s water bodies for decades, put it, “Musi abhi bhi zinda hai (Musi is still alive). Politicians may speak of it dismissively, but the river says, abhi bhi hum mein dum hai (there is still strength in me).”
Warnings from science sit behind that sentiment. INTACH’s Naturalising the River Front and Guide to Preparing River Basin Management Plans for Medium and Minor Rivers were both prepared as national reference documents. The first argues against ornamental embankments and for restoring riparian buffers, while the second sets out basin-wide planning principles. Their relevance to Musi is direct since both stress that narrowing floodplains pushes water into streets once the river loses its soft edges.
A recurring rule on their pages: maintain 12 to 15 metres of riparian buffer on each bank to provide a cushion against floods. Reality on several stretches reads differently — culverted pipes and new hardscape squeeze flow. Lubna Sarwath, environmental activist and founder of Save Our Urban Lakes, has tracked one such site near Narsingi where “half of Musi’s width was concreted, the rest culverted. The so-called service road overflowed because the river could no longer flow there.” She refers to a private gated community constructed on FTL land in that area.
Failures upstream compound that squeeze. She points to Osmansagar and Himayatsagar, arguing that landfill and encroachments have sharply cut storage. “The present capacity is maybe just 40 per cent,” she said. “Sixty per cent has to be restored if we want the city to be safe.” The consequence was visible when controlled releases, described as less than a quarter of the possible outflow, still sent water across the Mahatma Gandhi Bus Station.
Repair depends on more than design drawings. Dr Neha Sarwate completed her PhD on riverfront development at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and worked with the Vishwamitri citizen group in Vadodara. Their record shows what patient civic work can do. Letters, recorded meetings and transparent communication pressed officials to examine science over spectacle.
Her paper Citizen Intercession Towards Safeguarding the Vishwamitri River, India, traces how “the key takeaways were advocacy, alternatives and awareness.” That push resulted in the tribunal withdrawing the project and describing a river as a system rather than a channel — a reading that fits Musi’s mix of catchment, reservoirs, floodplain, and city reaches.
Tools exist for places already altered. Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach)’s riverfront note lists modest retrofits that blunt flood energy without new walls — coir log islands to slow water, riprap and transplanted trees along embankments, and limits on lighting to reduce stress on fauna. Each of these is small on paper and concrete in effect.
Officials say they are working from the same hydrology. E.V. Narasimha Reddy, managing director of the Musi Riverfront Development Corporation, wrote: “Our plans are based on the floodplain and the impact studies, with an action plan for mitigation. People should also understand the river flow patterns and the buffer zones along the banks and cooperate in making the river flow in its natural course while maintaining the ecological balance and improving livability.”
Meaning sits in how the city hears its critics and reads its maps. Lubna’s line lingers: “Musi was not in spate. It was in its space.” The river did what it always has, and whether Hyderabad chooses to respect that space will decide what floods look like in the years to come.
