Editorial: Hyderabad's demolition derby

For the last several days, the people of Hyderabad have been witness to the spectacle of municipal bulldozers razing, instead of the tenements of the poor as they usually do, the properties of the rich. At last count, 18 buildings belonging to film stars, politicians, and big realtors have been pulled down because they were built within the buffer zones of water bodies. Nearly 45 acres of land have thus been reclaimed for the city.

Among those who suffered an indignity normally reserved for the poor is Telugu film star Nagarjuna Akkineni, who built a convention hall within the full tank level of a lake. Some of the razed properties include those belonging to members of the ruling Congress party as well as important leaders of the opposition. The demolitions have been concentrated in upscale areas mostly, such as the IT district of Madhapur, and in the catchment areas of two freshwater lakes that supply drinking water to the city.

Areas to the west and south of Hyderabad have in the past 30 years become the happy hunting ground of the wealthy gentry. Caring little for land-use norms, developers assisted by corrupt town planners made a killing by building farmhouses and gated communities on lake beds, drains and lowlands. City wide, such encroachments have led to the disappearance or drastic shrinkage of more than 100 water bodies, turning a city that was made flood-proof by the famed engineer Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya a hundred years ago into a metropolis vulnerable to flooding in every rain.

The demolitions are being carried out by a specialised body set up for the purpose called HYDRA, short for Hyderabad Disaster Response and Assets Monitoring and Protection Agency (HYDRA). Although the name suggests an impressive mandate, it is a wrecking crew carved out of the municipality and given a free rein with its own dedicated resources, including a police station to handle complaints and tip-offs. In the few weeks it has been in existence, it has earned a Robin Hood reputation by keeping its targets secret, staging operations in the pre-dawn hours and taking no telephone calls from VIPs.

It's a guilty pleasure of the poor to see the rich put to discomfort, even if only momentarily. So, the HYDRA demolitions have been applauded by Hyderabad’s citizens, especially since they seem to do more than cosmetic damage to properties of the rich. However, shotgun bulldozer derbies, whether targeting Muslims and Dalits by BJP regimes in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, or the well-heeled in Hyderabad, cannot be a substitute for due process. They make for a great media spectacle and might serve to buttress a politician’s reputation as a strong man, but as a way of really solving a city’s urban flooding problem, they amount to zilch.

As a High Court judge pointed out while hearing a petition questioning HYDRA’s mandate, demolitions only cover up the administrative failures that led to them. Water bodies are not properly mapped and policed, which allows developers to carve up lake beds into plots. Town planners collude in this theft, which is given legitimacy by the registration department. Municipal officials wave it along by granting building permissions for a suitable consideration. It’s a rot that goes back decades. And then a wannabe strongman sends in a bulldozer and poses like Napoleon. It’s good for a headline and a day but the real work remains to be done.