THE CITY GOES UNDER

Flash floods following pounding rain in mid-October (a record 320 mm in 24 hours on October 14), and sluggish relief work have dented Hyderabad’s image as a growing metropolis. Ten days on, 185 lakes and tanks in the city were still overflowing and several residential areas remained waterlogged. The flood fury came at the end of an extended southwest monsoon season (the usual cutoff date is September 30) with water bodies already brimming. The floods took 50 lives.

A blame game is on but the truth is that the Lake Protection Committee, constituted by the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority in 2010, has come up short in fulfilling its mandate of demarcating boundaries and buffer zones of lakes;