The ‘plop’ sound of a stone disappearing beneath the water at Hyderabad’s Mir Alam Tank is all the proof Mohammed Ayub, a resident of Kishanbagh, needs to explain how the tank has changed since childhood. Ayub remembers swimming in the tank’s clean water and even drinking the water as a child, but now, the hyacinth-covered waterbody emits a foul smell.
The tank, constructed in 1806, was significantly larger and housed drinking water but is now polluted despite the installation of two sewage treatment plants (STPs).
The STPs were set up near Mir Alam Tank to treat water pollution from the slums of Shivrampally, Mir Mahmood Sahab ki Pahadi and other areas. The first plant, constructed at a cost of Rs 4 crore with a capacity to treat 5 million litres per day, was constructed in 2007, while the second plant costing Rs 3.95 crore was set up in 2010 to treat 10 million litres per day. The maintenance cost of both plants is Rs 90 lakh and Rs 60 lakh per year. Maintaining the two plants and the cost of construction has cost the exchequer over Rs 30 crore.
Residents and activists make it clear that the tank has only changed for the worse. “When I was younger, the water would come up to here,” said Ayub to TNM, raising his arm over his 5 ft 4 inches frame. “As I grew older, the tank shrunk.”
On the banks of the Mir Alam tank in a slum of Kishanbagh, 70-year-old Farzana (name changed) runs a tea stall. “The water was very clean when I was small. I grew up here, as did my children and grandchildren. We couldn’t make tea with the water back then as it was a little salty, but it was perfectly fine for cooking and bathing,” she says. Outside Farzana’s tea stall is a neatly organised pile of garbage alongside the water body. “It's all changed now. The stench is unbearable. A lot of trash is thrown over here and the tiny fish are missing as well,” she adds.
The Mir Alam lake was constructed by French engineers in 1806, and Michel Joachim Marie Raymond is said to have had a major role in its planning. The tank is named after Mir Alam Bahadur, the Prime Minister of Hyderabad state during the third Nizam, who commissioned the army to construct the tank using the reward that he received from the Nizam for winning the fourth Mysore War against Tipu Sultan. Several British accounts, including English writer Annie Brassey’s journal account titled The Last Voyage, published in 1889, recount flattering accounts of the Mir Alam Tank.
Speaking to TNM, a bird watcher from the city, Asif Husain Arastu, remarks that effluents from the Kattedan industrial area have caused a reduction in the number of birds which could be sighted near the tank. “Birds like white-throated kingfishers, cormorants and several ducks which could be spotted earlier are now amiss. These birds would consume the fish from the tank, but the pollution has made that difficult as well,” he remarks.
On the other side of the tank, Akbar, a resident of Shivrampally’s Mahmoodnagar, narrates a similar story. “See that rooster?” he asks, pointing to the fowl atop a pile of garbage, around 15 meters from the water body. “The water would flow till there and now it has reduced drastically because of encroachments.” Akbar’s neighbour, Bipasha adds that politicians come and go but the situation remains. “The water is sick and the slum is also sick. When it rains, children and old people injure themselves, fall sick as the impure water stagnates and has no place to go.”
The slums around the Mir Alam tank are occupied mostly by working-class Muslims who have resided in the area south of the Musi river for several generations and have witnessed its slow descent into pollution.
The tank shares a wall with the Nehru Zoological Park. On several occasions when Hyderabad witnessed floods, water from the tank filled to the brim, entered the zoo premises and the animals had to be shifted. A problem, the zoo’s Public Relations Officer (PRO) Haneef assures, isn’t in existence anymore and that the rains in July 2023 had no effect on the zoo.
“The zoo is safe. Even if the tank water happens to enter the zoo, animals sniff it and walk away,” he says.
These concerns are hardly new. The most recent development vis-a-vis Mir Alam Tank was the construction of a Rs 2.25 crore musical fountain, inaugurated in April 2022, which lies in disarray due to the water hyacinths beneath it. While the fountain and the state government’s investment in a six-lane cable bridge costing Rs 220 crore in 2022 have been heavily promoted, little has been said about water pollution.
The sewage treatment plants supposed to treat the water aren’t doing their job. According to a report by The Times of India, the Telangana State Pollution Control Board (TSPSC) admitted to the National Green Tribunal (NGT) in May 2022, that sewage is being released into the tank abutting the zoo park.
Even without the TSPSC’s admission, proof of pollution is hard to miss. Environment and civic activist SQ Masood remarks, "Sewage is coming from a lower plain to the treatment plant and as such isn't fully able to enter the STP. There isn't a need for an STP at every tank, but in cases like Mir Alam, the elevation of the STP has to be planned carefully." Masood further explained that the most common issue with STPs is that they are expensive and are often built for a much smaller population.
The National Inventory of Sewage Treatment Plants released by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in 2021 states that of the installed capacity at the 10 and 5 MLD Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs), 10 and 4.5 MLDs are treated. To treat the other sewage entering the tank, the state government is now constructing a 41.5 MLD STP costing Rs 69 crore. But, there is no clarity or data on how much sewage is entering the tank.
Masood further explains that solving this problem requires the government to conduct a proper study of the surrounding areas and catchment to understand how much sewage is entering the tank. “If sewage isn't stopped, then things will worsen and to stop the sewage, the government should set up a Mir Alam basin development authority to focus on the overall development of that area,” concludes Masood.