Hyderabad drops 14 structures around KBR National Park for two elevated corridors

Hyderabad has abandoned the seven flyovers and seven underpasses proposed around KBR National Park, at the centre of the city, and will instead build two elevated corridors. One will run from Nagarjuna Circle to Road No. 36 and the other from Road No. 12 to Shaikpet, taken up by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation and the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority respectively, to ease traffic towards Madhapur, Gachibowli and Knowledge City.

The 14 structures were planned under the Hyderabad City Innovative and Transformative Infrastructure (H-CITI) project. The decision to drop them follows the felling or severe pruning of numerous fully grown trees for translocation, the digging up of green median spaces for foundation work, and the conversion of a long stretch of road around the park into a grey, barren corridor. The project had been awarded to an agency that is expected to have received its first tranche of funds.

The rethink comes after the stretch around the park was made one-way to facilitate the structures. That arrangement turned out to be an unintended remedy for congestion the public had endured for years, a low-cost fix that had not been considered before the city committed to more cost- and carbon-intensive construction.

The push for road infrastructure dates to the Strategic Road Development Plan, conceived a decade ago by the then Bharat Rashtra Samithi government. Around 40 steel and concrete structures have come up under the scheme at a cost of more than ₹7,000 crore, while public transport was neglected over the same period, feeding a surge in private vehicles. Barring exceptions such as the steel bridge between VST and Indira Park, the SRDP structures largely failed to resolve traffic problems and worsened conditions at several junctions by shifting congestion to the next bottleneck.

An earlier proposal for six flyovers around the park under SRDP was halted by a citizens' movement, which cited the pending demarcation of the Eco-Sensitive Zone as a precondition. The H-CITI plan was a larger version of that proposal, with more than twice the number of structures, and the current plan merges the 14 structures into two elevated corridors.

About two months before the structures were dropped, Special Chief Secretary, Metropolitan Administration & Urban Development Jayesh Ranjan and Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Commissioner R.V. Karnan faced questions at a panel discussion on urban mobility, traffic congestion and city liveability. The questions, from students and working professionals, concerned a vertically expanding city with strained road infrastructure, a surge in private vehicles, limited public transport and shrinking space for pedestrians.

The episode points to a wider debate over planning priorities, at a time when an extended summer and devastating floods in Nepal have renewed attention to global warming. Each fully grown tree lowers local temperature by 1–5°C, while each concrete structure raises it by roughly the same measure.