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

Kasu Brahmananda Reddy National Park in Hyderabad turned into a giant traffic roundabout in August | Photo credit: NAGARA GOPAL

About two months ago, Special Chief Secretary, Metropolitan Administration & Urban Development Jayesh Ranjan and Commissioner, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation RV Karnan had to field some uncomfortable questions from a group of students and working professionals at a panel discussion on urban mobility, traffic congestion and city viability.

Some of the questions involved a vertically spinning city built against collapsing road infrastructure under the pressure of exploding private vehicles. Others related to the virtual absence of public transport and the increasingly limited possibilities of pedestrian movement. Both bureaucrats fumbled for answers.

The exchange revealed just how out of touch the government and its politicians are with the reality that millions of people who work, travel and try to get by in the city face every day.

Less than two months after the event, there were reports that seven flyovers and seven underpasses that the government had intended to build around the KBR National Park in the heart of the city had been cancelled. Instead, two elevated corridors — one from Nagarjuna Circle to Road No. 36, the other from Road No. 12 to Shaikpet — will be constructed by the GHMC and HMDA, respectively, to ease traffic towards Madhapur, Gachibowli and Knowledge City.

The sad part is that the 14 structures planned under the Hyderabad City Innovative and Transformative Infrastructure (H-CITI) project were scrapped only after they were felled or reduced to skeletons for relocation, green medians were dug up for establishment, and a large stretch of road around the park was left gray and barren. The project was assigned to an agency that already had to draw the first tranche of funds.

The government seems to have realized the futility of more road infrastructure only after the section around the park was converted to one-way traffic to facilitate construction. This one-way system proved to be a haphazard solution to the problems the public had suffered for years.

That this practical and inexpensive means was never considered as an alternative before the government went full throttle into building higher-cost, more carbon-emitting infrastructure says a lot about its priorities – priorities that even seasoned bureaucrats could not reasonably explain.

Mr. Jayesh Ranjan wryly spoke of building shelters for gig workers as a climate change measure – after removing full-grown shade trees.

The drive to speed up private transport on city roads began with the strategic road development plan proposed by the then Bharat Rashtra Samithi government a decade ago. Around 40 steel and concrete structures at a cost of over ₹7,000 crore have so far been erected under this plan. During the same period, public transport was severely neglected, contributing to a massive increase in private vehicles taking up more and more road space.

With a few exceptions, such as the steel bridge between VST and Indira Park, the structures built under the SRDP have largely failed to meaningfully address traffic issues. In fact, they worsened the situation at several intersections and only moved the congestion to another bottleneck.

An earlier proposal to build six flyovers around the KBR National Park under the SRDP was successfully thwarted by a citizens’ movement citing the expected demarcation of an eco-sensitive zone as a prerequisite. The H-CITI project is just a poorly planned extension of the previous proposal with more than double the number of structures. Thanks to ever-compliant infrastructure and traffic engineering consultants, this third version instead envisions the same 14 buildings converging into two above-ground corridors.

This year’s prolonged summer coupled with devastating floods in Nepal have shown that global warming is not a hoax. Each fully grown tree will reduce the local temperature by 1-5°C; each concrete structure raises it by roughly the same amount. Math is not hard. All that is needed is a willingness to recognize this and include it in every plan – a realization that has been lacking in successive governments, blinded by immediate, local concerns.

Published – 23 Sep 2026 10:15 IST