No water in Kothaguda Botanical Garden

Hyderabad: The ongoing water crisis in the IT corridor is having an impact on the Botanical Garden in Kothaguda where the greenery is disappearing with each passing day.

The garden has five borewells and an open well apart from ponds. A year back, the ponds and the open well dried up due to lack of rains and the plants were being watered from the borewells.But, four months back, four of the five borewells also dried up. The remaining borewell is at the rear of the garden near Gachibowli Hou-sing Board Colony, far from the main garden. Thus the plants near the main entrance, near the rock garden and around the boating pond are bearing the brunt.

To overcome the situation, officials from the Telangana State Forest Development Corpor-ation (TSFDC) had urged the Hyderabad Metro-politan Water Works and Sewerage Board (HMW-W&SB) and Hyderabad Metropolitan Develop-ment Authority officials to supply sufficient water for the garden.
However, an official source from TSFDC told this newspaper that the water works officials had rejected the plea due to the situation in the IT corridor. “As the government has decided to supply HMWW&SB water to neighbouring gram panchayats, they were not willing to supply water to the garden,” the source said.

Botanical garden in-charge and deputy plantation manager Mr N. Rajender told this newspaper that the HMDA had allowed them to withdraw water from Durgam Cheruvu. “We will have to pay Rs150 per 15,000 litre of water. Though the transportation charges from Durgam Cheruvu to the Botanical Garden are around Rs 1,350, we are procuring water from there. Local water tanker operators are charging Rs 1,200 to Rs 1,500 for a 5,000-litre tanker,” he said.

Besides the ongoing water problem, there is no botanist to take care of the plants in the garden for the past year. The plants do not get manure and vermi-compost regularly and they are withering away. Similarly, the glass house that was launched in 2006 for water plants is unused as all the aquatic plants have died due to lack of maintenance.

The 70-acre garden is part of a reserve forest and was developed by the erstwhile Andhra Pra-desh Forest department in 2001. The name of the garden was changed from Bhagya Nagar Botanical Garden to Kotla Vijaya Bhaskar Reddy Botanical Garden in 2005 during the time of Y. S.R.

The garden had been given on a 33 year lease to a private firm in 2006. But after several groups opposed the decision and approached the courts, the Forest Development Corporation had taken it back from the private firm in August 2014.