Makeover sought for Hussainsagar

Could Hussainsagar Lake, the pride of Hyderabad, do with an overhaul? Or to put it nicely, a makeover? The architects in the city along with many residents, certainly feel so. The beautiful Hussainsagar Lake which was once the haven of city slickers needing a break during the day or in the evenings, is now largely inaccessible to the public thanks to large portions of the lakefront being privately managed.

Pedestrians and lake goers now have very few areas to explore and enjoy. Places like Sanjeeviah Park and People’s Plaza are still accessible but a large part of the lakefront has now become a part of some commercial activity or the other.

“A lake should be accessible from all sides to the public, because in an urban setting very few open spaces of leisure exist”, says Shankar Narayan an architect who has been against the privatization and concretization of lake beds. Across the 10km lakefront, spaces like Jalavihar, P.V Narasimha Rao memorial, Eat Street compel the public to enter the private setting if they want to see the beauty of the lake.

Narayan also observes that the tank borders have now been concretized which can be dangerous. According to him, it should retain the soil and green cover to have an environmentally sustainable discharge area for flood-like situations as seen in 2016. Agreeing with this concept, Sneha Pathasarthy, an architect from Deccan Amalgam observes in her design project with EPFAD at Barcelona, that the 3.6 Km Necklace Road remains inaccessible to the public on the northern and western sides of the lake, as railway lines for MMTS, to Sanjeeviah Park Stop and Necklace Road Stop are in this corridor. She explains the urban structure she conceived, in a way recreates the elevated points that the city had during the Nizams. “They were accessible only to the rich, but these urban structures are intended to be inclusive.”