Will reclaim all encroached water bodies in and around Hyderabad, says Bhatti Premium

Telangana government to use Geospatial Technology to reclaim encroached water bodies in Hyderabad for restoration.

The State government is determined to make the water bodies in and around State Capital Hyderabad encroachment free after realising that as many as 491 of the 920 identified lakes and tanks had been fully or partially encroached in the last 20 years.

“We will reclaim all the encroached water bodies using the Geospatial Technology applications through Telangana Remote Sensing Applications Centre (TGRAC). This nodal agency has taken up the task to map, identify the water bodies and possibly encroachments using legacy data (historical geospatial datasets) before 2014 and after the formation of Telangana State,” Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka asserted during an interaction.

The Deputy CM during over an hour long interaction with The Hindu Editor Suresh Nambath, Digital Editor Subhash Kevin Rai, Visual Editor Dinesh Krishna and other senior Editorial team leaders made it very clear how the Congress government is going to crach the whip on anybody, who has encroached the water bodies.

Stating that the TGRAC, functioning under the Planning department had done a meticulous job in identifying and demarcating the water bodies in and around Hyderabad and up to Outer Ring Road.

“We have used remote sensing and GIS techniques in and around Hyderabad and up to ORR along with its area and extent to identify, demarcate the water bodies,” he said pointing out that this was done to create a standard digital database of all water bodies and help in identifying the possible encroachments,” Mr. Bhatti Vikramarka noted.

Elaborating further, the Deputy CM said the TGRAC team had used revenue village Cadastral Maps, administrative boundaries beginning with village, mandal, district, GHMC and ORR. Survey of India toposheets of the year 1970, Satellite images of year 2014 and 2023 were used during the entire exercise.

Explaining the methodology, Mr. Bhatti Vikramarka said the water bodies information as available in the Cadastral Maps (of 1940s) were extracted and digitised. Then the Survey of India Toposheet was used to delineate the rest of the water bodies, duly superimposing them on the Cadastral Maps to exclude water bodies available on the Cadastral Maps.