Why lessons from Hyderabad’s KBR faux pas must inform our future

The Government has dropped its plan for seven flyovers and seven underpasses around KBR National Park, opting instead for two elevated corridors meant to ease traffic towards Madhapur, Gachibowli and Knowledge City.

From 14 structures to two corridors

Less than two months after a public exchange in which senior officials faced pointed questions on urban mobility, traffic congestion and city liveability, news emerged that the 14 proposed structures around the park would not go ahead.

The abandoned plan was part of the Hyderabad City Innovative and Transformative Infrastructure project, under which seven flyovers and seven underpasses had been intended around KBR National Park, at the heart of the city.

In their place, two elevated corridors are now proposed: one from Nagarjuna Circle to Road No. 36, and another from Road No. 12 to Shaikpet.

The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation will build one of these corridors, while the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority will build the other.

The stated purpose of the new corridors is to ease traffic towards Madhapur, Gachibowli and Knowledge City.

A costly reversal after visible damage

The reversal has come only after scores of fully grown trees were felled or reduced to skeletons for translocation around the park.

Green median spaces had also been dug up for foundation work, and a large stretch of road around the park was left grey and barren.

The project had already been awarded to an agency that must already have drawn its first tranche of funds.

This sequence is central to why the development matters: the Government did not step back before the environmental and streetscape damage had begun, but only after the area around the park had already been altered for the proposed works.

The Government appears to have realised the futility of more road infrastructure only after the stretch around the park was converted to one-way traffic to facilitate the planned structures.

That one-way system then turned out to be a serendipitous fix for gridlocks the public had suffered for years.

The irony is that this handy, no-cost remedy was not considered as an alternative before the Government went full throttle into building more cost- and carbon-intensive infrastructure.

The episode says a great deal about official priorities, especially because even seasoned bureaucrats were unable to reasonably explain them.

Questions officials could not answer

About two months ago, Special Chief Secretary, Metropolitan Administration & Urban Development Jayesh Ranjan and Commissioner, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation R.V. Karnan had to field uncomfortable questions from students and working professionals.

The questions came during a panel discussion on urban mobility, traffic congestion and city liveability.

Some questions focused on a vertically spiralling city set against collapsing road infrastructure that is under pressure from an explosion in private vehicles.

Others dealt with the virtual absence of public transport and the increasingly restricted options for pedestrian movement.

Both bureaucrats fumbled for answers.

That exchange exposed how detached the Government and its policymakers are from the reality millions face daily while working, travelling and struggling to get by in the city.

Mr. Jayesh Ranjan had also been talking about building shelters for gig workers as a climate-change measure, even after fully grown, shade-giving trees had been removed.

The SRDP legacy

The current debate around KBR National Park sits within a longer push to speed up private transportation on Hyderabad’s roads.

That push began with the Strategic Road Development Plan, conceived a decade ago by the then Bharat Rashtra Samithi Government.

Under the SRDP, around 40 structures in steel and concrete have risen so far.

Those structures have cost more than ₹7,000 crore.

Over the same period, public transport was severely neglected.

That neglect fed a massive surge in private vehicles, which have been eating up more and more road space.

Barring a few exceptions, such as the steel bridge between VST and Indira Park, the structures built under the SRDP largely failed to meaningfully resolve traffic issues.

In several places, they worsened matters by merely shifting congestion to the next bottleneck.

An earlier proposal to build six flyovers around KBR National Park under the SRDP had been successfully thwarted by a citizens’ movement.

That movement invoked the pending demarcation of the Eco-Sensitive Zone as a precondition.

The H-CITI project is a poorly planned expansion of that earlier proposal, with more than twice the number of structures.

Thanks to ever-compliant infrastructure and transport engineering consultants, this third version imagines the same 14 structures merging into two elevated corridors instead.

Climate costs and planning choices

The KBR episode also underlines the climate cost of planning that treats road capacity as the default solution.

This year’s extended summer, coupled with Nepal’s devastating floods, has shown that global warming is not a hoax.

Each fully grown tree brings down local temperature by 1, 5°C.

Each concrete structure raises local temperature by roughly the same measure.

The maths is not difficult.

What is needed is the willingness to acknowledge this and factor it into every plan.

That realisation has been absent in successive Governments, which have been blinkered by immediate, parochial concerns.

In the KBR case, the contrast is sharp: fully grown trees were removed, green medians were dug up, and a cost- and carbon-intensive plan advanced before a no-cost traffic management fix was recognised.

The lesson from the faux pas is therefore not limited to one park or one road stretch.

It goes to the way Hyderabad has prioritised steel and concrete structures while neglecting public transport, pedestrian movement and the daily experience of people trying to move through the city.

Source: The Hindu