Hyderabad has officially become the largest city in the country, with its new administrative structure formally operationalised on December 26.
The chiefs of the city’s 12 zones have taken charge and will begin discharging their duties starting next week.
With the Telangana government’s November 21 decision to merge 27 surrounding municipalities and urban local bodies into the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), the city’s footprint has also expanded nearly threefold—from 651 square km to 2,053 square km. Officials say the expanded jurisdiction now covers a population of over 1.3 crore.
Post-merger, the number of zones has been doubled from six to 12, while circles have increased from 30 to 60. Wards have been expanded from 150 to 300.
State finance minister D. Sridhar Babu announced that the merger was required to ensure uniform growth across the Hyderabad urban region. The government said it would be difficult to work on transportation linkages, real estate growth—and even development—if the urban region was to continue being governed by different civic bodies.
Out of the 12 zones, the state has appointed nine IAS officers as zonal commissioners, indicating its seriousness in providing better governance for the expanded city.
The government argues that with several smaller municipal bodies and their limited financial resources, governing the fast-growing Hyderabad region had become a major problem—especially owing to uneven infrastructure development and a lack of accountability.
Now, the government says it has the opportunity to improve living standards by better handling civic works, sanitation, town planning, and grievance redressal.
Another question that arises is how Hyderabad could become the largest city in the country, surpassing other metropolises like Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, New Delhi and Kolkata.
The answer lies in the expansion model that the Telangana government chose for Hyderabad, which is sharply different from that in other metros.
For instance, the Delhi National Capital Region (Delhi-NCR) and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) expanded not by enlarging a single city, but by the inclusion of neighbouring cities and districts.
The included cities and towns would continue to have their own municipal bodies and state jurisdictions.
Delhi-NCR, for example, includes urban regions from Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan.
Governance is coordinated through planning bodies (such as the NCR Planning Board), while day-to-day civic functions remain fragmented across dozens of local authorities.
Similarly, the MMR expanded by absorbing Mumbai’s growth into a set of separate municipal corporations and councils—including Thane, Navi Mumbai, Kalyan-Dombivli and others—overseen by a regional planning authority, rather than a single city government.
Hyderabad has taken a different route.
Instead of creating a multi-city metropolitan region, the Telangana government chose to expand the city itself by merging surrounding municipalities directly into the GHMC.
This converted once-separate civic bodies into wards and circles within one municipal corporation, bringing taxation, planning, enforcement and service delivery under a single administrative chain.
The result is a much larger city with unified governance, in contrast to the NCR and MMR’s federated model, where coordination depends on consensus across multiple governments and agencies.
