The government and Municipal Administration Minister K.T. Rama Rao in particular should take immediate steps to prevent further environmental degradation of the twin cities with water bodies totally polluted and encroached while the municipal solid waste collection as well as disposal floundering before luring investors, said the Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday.
“The Minister has been active in the World Economic Summit (WES) in Davos aggressively marketing Hyderabad whereas the reality is the Telangana High Court and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) have pulled up the government for pollution of lakes and shoddy garbage collection,” charged senior leader Karuna Gopal at a press conference.
She claimed that the twin cities has also reached a state of ‘ICU’ because of the extent of toxicity present in the water bodies where cadmium levels have reached an all time high. This, along with the manner of collection and disposal of the municipal solid waste will only lead to rise in communicable and non-communicable diseases among the people.
“The Minister has been at the helm of affairs for many years now and has been doing just cosmetic surgery. There is a danger of the city being turned from a ‘Bhagyanagar’ to an ‘Abhagyanagar’. There is nothing wrong in inviting more pharma firms but there should be similar efforts to clean up. It is regrettable that the Pollution Control Board (PCB) checks pollution levels of just 17 lakes when we have up to 4,000 water bodies,” she charged.
The water bodies in and around the city are not only polluted and encroached upon with dwellings, the largescale presence of water hyacinth is an indication that the household sewage is freely flowing into them. “There has been no effort to control flow of industrial effluents either and the assurance of putting up sewage treatment plants plus effluent treatment plants have not fructified,” the BJP leader pointed out.
“This is an uncaring and irresponsible government. No one knows what happened to the hundreds of crores of rupees received in aid for cleaning up Hussainsagar and other lakes but there are attempts to dilute the GO 111 to destroy Himayatsagar and Osmansagar lakes,” she charged.
