Prologue: In memoriam of all the trees, green spaces and life forms of all shapes and sizes that have been uprooted, maimed and sacrificed to make a city of the future (as if) over the last four decades in Hyderabad under different regimes with an almost singular understanding of economic growth (wish it wasn’t so), I recount these words of a poet from very long ago.
Unseen, that silent tree
Spreads, in the garb of wide leisure
Subtle relationships in the sky
Earth and air
With its million cups of leaves
Drinking from the fount of the primal force.
With no work to do I sit in the shade alone
And out of my idleness
My consciousness streams forth in diverse direction
Unnoticed
In distant times and climes
In fancy’s net.
***
That O tree is why I come and sit
In front of you
I want my words to grow easy
Under the deep shade…
Today in the twilight hours
Let all thoughts and sorrow of this life
Gather close to my consciousness and blaze forth
Like the evening star
The last utterance of this life –
‘I love’. [Tagore, in Ghosh, Bhattacharya, Mandal, Eds, Tagore and Flowers, 1993]
There was an Acacia tree once that I knew intimately, or so I thought. Full-grown, with its branches covering a vast span from east to west (or vice versa) across the windows of two rooms of an apartment flat. That is why, in the first place, for that tree, of green leaves and yellow flowers, that I bought my first ever living space in Hyderabad many autumns ago. The windows needed no artificial shades. Orioles, Sunbirds, a particular family of Koels, a common Babbler, etc were regular visitors there. On a rare occasion or two a Kingfisher too would be seen, before flying past. Bumble bees, beetles, butterflies of myriad hues and shades were also part of that treescape. And then, gradually, the travails of that tree (and travails of a freelancer) began to coincide with the transformation of a cityscape, and dislocations elsewhere (far from the city, by the banks of a river, for instance): a big dam here and a project here and there and the real estate boom sounded the death-knell for several trees, ponds and lakes and rivers here and there. Gradually, the tree too found its share of those who resented it. Sometimes, it was the electricity department happily chopping off the lustrous green branches. Sometimes, they blamed the tree for power cuts during monsoons or in peak summer (too) and at others people cursed its branches that interfered with their cable / wi-fi wires (or was it vice versa?). With its branches, the tree gradually lost the bird friends, too, and gradually it has become a pale shadow of itself. But that is an old story. But, is it? It may be just a metaphor of how natural life forms give way to provide for artificial lifestyles in a ‘booming economy’.
The city with its dominant metaphor and motif being distance and alienation, from nature and natural life forms where towering apartment buildings and more and more real estate development is shrinking the remaining green spaces or, on the other hand, green spaces and ‘green living’ is advertised as the aspiration of the rich and super rich with gated greenery, itself un-naturally conceived and ‘landscaped’. Farm lands have fast given way to residential localities. Very few speak up for causes of tree protection, animal welfare (without being moralistic about only one species).
The city, with its own logic as an economic tool necessarily distances and alienates within an anthropocentric organising of the world around money, and aspirational ambitions influenced by social media, alongside ideas of family, leisure, happiness, pleasure, all neatly internalised without any connection with the natural world, which is gradually transforming all around us. Metros seem to have zombies travelling in them and the continuous consumption of images and videos further move people away from the natural world but that is the nature of the system and it is meant to keep them away and glued to the workplace of automatons who will maintain the status quo.
When a ‘disaster’ strikes, people are caught ‘by surprise’, while it was all but waiting to happen. In the pace of this aspirational world, the slow movement of a pupa towards its butterfly moment is not significant enough to be noticed. Only the cries of the peacock frozen by some students at the university campus as the machines felled trees suddenly woke some people up from the reverie of the city life to know that there is this space that looks like a zen forest in the midst of a city.
Whenever intimacies are articulated politically, since they evoke ethics, justice, and equality by extension, there is a problem for the existing systems. Intimacy with the natural world is different from the kind of binding of the natural world that happens to suit one’s ego or obsession with the love for nature.
And thus, I enter the present discourse on the Kancha Gachibowli ‘village’, nay ‘forest’, by the University of Hyderabad.
The Sense of Yet, again, or Déjà vu
So that we may not forget.
Trees – 84 species, shrubs – 16, climbers and creepers – 11, herbs – 6, bamboos, 2, grasses – 5, fauna – animals – 35; reptiles – 15; birds – around 180. And then there were fish species, and threatened and endangered migratory birds, mammals, herptile species…and so on and so forth.
Villages – (officially) 276; Acts in place – Wildlife Act, PESA, FRA, and so on and so forth.
People – nearly 300,000, including the Scheduled Tribes, Castes and others.
Yet, and yet, it did not stop a dam from continuously being built since the year of its commencement in 2005 and several regimes of different political parties.
May be those today fighting for 400 acres of land in Hyderabad city, could spare a thought or few moments of retrospective sadness for the Polavaram dam-displaced people and ruined habitat of the animals and birds and other life forms, of whom little is known today. Because, sometimes, only names change while the issues remain.
Who lives in ‘KGF’?
Moving to the KGF ecological zone. The last near-‘scientific’ enumeration of flora and fauna was apparently done by WWF-India (as revealed by sources from within the university). According to the Kancha Gachibowli: claim for Protection as a Reserve Forest (prepared by Arun Vasireddy and Sriram Reddy), collating information from reports such as the State of Birds report of 2023, reports sourced from the Friends of Snakes Society (which rescues snakes and advocates for their protection), etc. this eco-zone has 233 bird species, including high priority birds as per the IUCN category of high priority (11 in number), such as the Common Pochard, River Tern, Asian Woolly Necked Stork, Painted Stork, Oriental Darter, Black-headed Ibis, Spot-billed Pelican, among others. Those protected by the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 (27 species) include Forest Wagtail, Shikra, Booted Eagle, Indian Peafowl, Osprey, Brahminy Kite, White-eyed Buzzard, Small Minivet, Western Marsh Harrier, White-rumped Vulture, etc.
The Indian Black Turtle, the Indian Flap-shelled Turtle, Star Tortoise, etc are also recorded. Indian Chameleon, Bengal Monitor Lizard, Indian Rock Python, Russell’s Viper, spectacled Cobra, Indian Rat Snake, Common Bronze-backed Snake, Beaked Worm Snake, Common House Gecko, Termite Hill Gecko, etc are among the 27 species of reptiles as recorded between 2012 and 2024.
There are numerous Spotted Deer in this area and the human activities in the area seems to have caused some conflict even in the past, since students have reported that many of them do stray into the campus of the university, especially around the hostel areas and have been attacked by stray dogs.
At least 13 varieties of amphibians have been recorded such as the Asian Common Toad, Red Narrow-mouth Frog, Jerdon’s Bull Frog, Ornate Narrow-mouth Frog, Marbled Balloon Frog, among others.
It may be mentioned at this point that there are other areas in Greater Hyderabad around canals and ponds (less-known and hence unnoticed) which also have several species of birds but their habitat is constantly challenged by the growing civic problems including water and sanitation related issues and cutting of trees and shrubs (places such as the Malkajgiri, Kapra, Sainikpuri, Peerzadiguda, the localities in and around Patancheru, among many others) where nobody ever considered documentation of species till date. Strangely enough, many of them survive even in areas with known pollutants and effluents in the lakes there. Perhaps these species do survive and learn to adapt to the life in a city. It may be mentioned, also, that some animals and birds, too, may have learnt to adapt and survive in the challenging expanding urban spaces, but not much is documented about their mechanisms of survival, including nesting, breeding, and feeding patterns.
However, coming to the real question
According to what the faculty and students reported, in the first week of April, students found dozens of bulldozers mowing this space and several trees were crushed and in the resultant chaos, peacocks cried and some deer (including a baby deer) ran from fear and strayed into the campus, where they were attacked by stray dogs on campus.
If mere numbers and mere nomenclatures and mere categories (‘IUCN’, ‘WPA’, ‘Scheduled List’, etc) had truly mattered, why, there would have been no dislocations and constant shrinking of habitat for Indian wildlife. Violations have been the norm over the years; the existence of Vantara, for example, is one glorious example of flouting of all of these and other rules of the game.
No number of arguments have made it easy for environment and state of the Earth, and it is even harder today, with those that claim with pride, “I will drill, baby, drill” ruling the roost. More than a particular political party, it is the very nature of anthropocentric world-view that must be questioned beyond the kind of terminology used even in this movement: “our land”, for one. Earthspace needs to be centered here. In many localities in Hyderabad the very idea of green is a luxury they have been shut out from; owning even a one-room tenement in a cluster settlement has become the only aspirational ladder to climb.
Incidentally, in one of the Asterix comics, titled Obelix and Co., this upstart of an economist advises Ceasar to keep the Gauls busy, making menhirs, for money (for what, the Gauls themselves are not sure) and prevent further attacks on the Romans. The outcome ends up as more menhirs line up in the city than Romans can manage. Similarly, we are building cities with more houses than people have resources to buy, more institutions than students joining them and yet more and more forests and breathing spaces are being usurped to expand this very city to show for an illusory growth.
The Issue at hand
A PIL (Public Interest Litigation) 25/2025 was filed against the State government of Telangana for taking over the land that the University says belongs to it. The University of Hyderabad was originally allotted land 2400 (including the ‘KG-F’) in year 1974 with conditions that the land would be used for educational purposes. The legal loophole was that there was no conveyance deed registered by subsequent authorities of the university since all these years. The State government is (simply put) seeking the land that it claims it legally owns which is the 400 acres of the Kancha Gachibowli.
In 2000, the then government of (undivided) Andhra Pradesh (under the Chief Minister N. Chandra Babu Naidu, the original architect of the Hi-tech city and real estate boom) had alienated 400 acres of university land to be given over to a private sports academy (M/s. IMG Bharata, a fully owned subsidiary of IMG Florida). Accordingly, the University agreed to alienate its land. However, the promised alternate land was not given to the university. Under the following government, under Dr. Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy as Chief Minister, in 2004, the above contract with the private party was annulled. The private party filed a case in the court against this annulment. Ever since, under subsequent governments (Kiran Kumar Reddy, K. Chandrasekhara Rao, and now Revanth Reddy), the idea remained that the land in question (which includes Kancha Gachibowli) belongs to the state government. Now the court upheld the state government’s claim of its ownership. According to some reports, in this entire process of legal arguments, there was no idea of ‘Forest land’, as it is not apparently noted as such in revenue records. The Telangana government states that Kancha Gachibowli village (the said land) is reflected as revenue land in the records. It is perceived to have been grazing lands (and hence “unproductive”). Ultimately, the said land (under survey no. 25) was handed over to the TGIIC (Telangana Industrial Infrastructure Corporation) and the land parcel does not include the lakes (Buffalo Lake, Peacock Lake), nor is there a plan of the government to destroy the mushroom rock, as per information currently available. Apparently, the Telangana state government plans to commission a detailed environmental management plan before drafting its master plan to ensure “sustainable development”.
If one were to build an argument merely on the basis of legality of land ownership, there is no need to say any further and that leads us down a different alley altogether. Into the questions of ownership, alienation of land, and so on. However, even if this were a revenue land and grazing land, (which shows at some point in history it was of use to common people of the villages that are today institutes – private and government, including the university itself) and even if the said land has today grown into a veritable oasis of exquisite greenery, birding spaces, where animals and wildlife has moved in (having no other space in the vast city), should this alone not suffice to protect this space as it is, rather than for the university or the government to go on endlessly over a paternity war? In any case, how is “forest land” notified in India? When, paradoxically, even notified “forest land” has been in the past given away so easily for projects that are particularly harmful to the forests and environment?
The entire discourse must move away from the arguments so far always used which have almost always failed. So-called developmental projects have almost always looked the other way when wildlife and biodiversity matters have been raised, or when the humans involved happened to be the most marginalised: tribal communities and Dalits across the spectrum with no resources to fight protracted battles in the court.
Today, as it stands
Negotiations are currently on between faculty of the University (under University of Hyderabad Teachers Association) and the government of Telangana to resolve the issue and apparently talks are on to give the University of Hyderabad an alternative that may be agreeable for its purposes. No official statement has so far been put forth.
Meanwhile, Media and Messages
One thing, though that is disturbing and reveals the level of double speak comes from the sudden interest in the issue shown by film fraternity and social media influencers. Because the question remains: where were these people when larger displacements and far greater destructions of eco-systems and natural spaces happened in both undivided AP and Telangana in the past? None of them have ever protested, for instance, against the Polavaram dam, with the largest adverse change to the ecosystem fed by Godavari river. Not many raise issue with the film fraternities shooting in wildlife reserves (with or without permission, which is a secondary matter, because they do end up disturbing the wildlife); who will ever know how many changes were made in the environs where the film Pushpa was shot (near Maredumilli forest); why are there increasing numbers of simians on the road from Rajahmundry towards Maredumilli forests and further to Rampachodavaram, begging for food from passers-by, who also feed them rice and ‘pulihora’ (tamarind rice)? Why doesn’t any wildlife conservationist raise these issues? Just last year, one chanced upon another film shooting in the vicinity of a national park in Andhra Pradesh. It is the same fraternity that is today sharing responses to protect Kancha Gachibowli. Is it because it is in Hyderabad and do urban environmental movements end up eliciting more social media reactions compared to larger battles fought elsewhere by people who cannot indulge in social media?
Similarly, you have the BRS and BJP-ABVP supporters showing support for this issue. ABVP needs to look at the record of its own parent party in other places in India on issues of wildlife, ecology and displacement. The KCR government had its own share of projects that altered the ecology of other spaces, in Telangana. Kaleswaram project is a case in point for the destruction of forest land. Today, K.T.R, from the BRS Party is seen protesting the Congress government of Telangana on the issue of Kancha Gachibowli.
These are disturbing questions that must also be given a thought to by those who are at the forefront of the present agitation. Students, especially, need to steer clear of becoming pawns of political parties that are out to gain lost ground.
Another disturbing question comes to mind: the last major agitation that happened in the University of Hyderabad was after the suicide of the dalit student Rohith Vemula. While it feels good to see the re-energising of the student fraternity after all these years, one may look at the other side of it. During that agitation in 2016, the university authorities went all out against their own students, by calling in the police and getting several students arrested and throwing many others out. It may be remembered, sadly, that last year (2024), after a long legal process, the courts exonerated the then VC of the same university of the charges of having abetted the suicide of Rohith. Others were also exonerated which include Smriti Irani and Bandaru Dattatreya of the BJP. A final closure was filed, citing lack of evidence. This time round, the university authorities and students and faculty seem to be (at least) on one page in this issue of ‘land ownership’’ to begin with, but it goes to the credit of nature conservationists, wildlife enthusiasts and chroniclers (including from among students and faculty) that beyond land, they perceived the ecological value of the space.
That being so, it may also be added that many other important issues have now been pushed to the backburner, which the student movement could have perhaps responded to: the Waqf Bill (recently passed), the delimitation issue, the language issue and NEP. Each of these issues are not apart from and outside of other fights for land, forests and a better earthspace.
It must be said also that the Revanth Reddy government after all could not have chosen a worse timing (politically, especially, and otherwise, considering the importance of all the above issues, especially when federalism itself is under attack from the BJP) to claim its paternity over the Kancha Gachibowli land of 400 acres for infrastructure development – whether sustainable, or not. Considering also, that the world political economy is volatile, to say the very least.
Let me end with a personal testimony, and some final thoughts on the nature-human binary that is the essence of the anthropocentric money market system ruling the world today.
“It was year 2022; I had lost my mother and sister (I am not married); I was depressed and traumatised. My students urged me to go with them on these long walks, sometimes covering around 10-12 kilometers on weekends. We used to cover the vast stretches of lush greenery on our university campus. I also climbed the mushroom rock with them once. We spotted deer, peacocks and sometimes porcupines, as well on these walks. The water body, the sounds of birds, the colours…. How can I define the feeling? The aesthetic joy of those walks which helped me recuperate and heal from my loss.”
This was Dr. Vijay Ramdas, who teaches Environmental history at the University of Hyderabad.
So, at one end is this emotional, the non-commercial and non-economic aspect of nature and human connect to a space and meanings it holds. For me, all this is not quite as new: the conversion of vast stretches of lush green – fields or forests; various shades of blue and grey of rivers; the beige and at times golden stretches of sands into dumping yards, or heavy machinery, the cacophony of economic development (of a kind) which numbs cries of joy (or pain, as the case may be) of birds, animals, organisms seen and unseen.
Every few years, the reconfiguration of Hyderabad has led to the death of rocks, trees, lakes, and by extension, change in the birding patterns, and habitat of several members of wildlife in and around the city. Decades ago, there existed a Save the Rocks Society in Hyderabad, with its members actively advocating for protection of rocks from being quarried and crushed for building localities. Nothing substantial had come out of those pleas and petitions and over the years, it is only a few rocks that can still be seen in the city – a far cry from ones we as school children had seen. Areas such as Kukkatpally, Miyapur, Patancheru and those by Gachibowli (where the Hyderabad University now stands) were dotted with fascinating rock formations and greenery and ponds and lakes. While other rocky spaces including Banjara Hills and Jubilee Hills have slowly given way to homes of the well-heeled, including the higher echelons of administration (in whichever government ae to power), few pockets continue to exist in today’s city, as delights for those who care for nature and take care to document the species, including birds in these pockets.
Various Chief Ministers over the years have tried to give their own unique trademark for the city and decided unilaterally to lead it in the way they deemed fit. So, the cartography moved in tandem with the ambitions and whims and fancies of the chief minsters of the state, irrespective of the party they belonged to. Greater Hyderabad was always about usurping lands that were once green – farm lands or what is usually noted as ‘wasteland’ but had its use in the larger ecological paradigm. Real estate has often hovered over political alignments, scuffles, crowning or dethroning powers. The present issue too may ultimately be part of this longer trajectory of political aesthetic, which is not the ecological aesthetic and that is not new. But the mainstream media has built it as narrative focussing on Revanth Reddy and the Congress government alone.
Finally,
Most natural spaces are contested today; there is an almost virile male (idea of) nation (in most parts of the globe) in a rush to establish paternity by injecting the seed of authority and dominion over natural resources towards an illusory idea of ‘growth’, in spite of peak oil and other crises of climate change (the two terms used for international agreements and conferences) without changing the ideology of a paternal, exploitative and extractive approach to nature and natural resources.
How is nature, or some aspects of nature, or other natural, perceived by people/communities (and political rulers)? Is it perceived similarly by all? Do marginalised communities [at some levels you may include disempowered students, too] perceive Nature differently? Is it decided by communities or by a larger idiom, constructed by those who rule the ‘’developmental’’ logic? Is intimacy with nature [perhaps over the years intimacy of a few students with the space called ‘’KGF”, a ‘’forest’’, as they perceive it] a mere romantic (within a ‘’universalised’’ category of ‘romantic’) whim? Or, is it an unfeigned intimacy that can’t be sidelined by the whim of an anthropocentric, corporate, political ideology? Can there be intimacy and unbelonging at the same time? Or, Is belongingness the quintessence of intimacy? [R.Umamaheshwari, ‘’Nature and Belonging: Distance, Development, and Intimacy”, (pp. 46-64), in Kaustav Chakraborty, Ed. The Politics of Belonging in Contemporary India, Routledge, 2020]
The larger challenge in the present situation – both on part of the University of Hyderabad and the state government – would be to be accepting of the fact that a protracted legal battle has actually led to the natural progression of a space into a veritable eco-zone with its own logic and beauty within an otherwise vertically growing city with no connection to the ground below. Could there be an acceptance shown for the birds and animals and bees and butterflies and innumerable life forms underneath, unseen, to retain their homes within a space so far protected, even without formal protocols, even without the strictures that come associated within so-called National Parks and Reserved Forests, which continue to be despoiled? Isn’t there beauty in allowing for such spaces to exist without formalising their being-ness? Perhaps the Congress government as well as the University, should let go of the idea of paternity and embrace the idea of the allowance that made for the existence of this ‘KGF’, in the first place, as a naturally grown home for species protected from human encroachment; the challenge will be to see that the space is protected and preserved by all the parties concerned. Privatising cannot be and should not even be considered, sustainable, or otherwise. *****
R Umamaheshwari is an independent journalist-historian based in Shimla and author of When Godavari Comes: People’s History of a River (Journeys in the Zone of the Dispossessed), 2014, among other works.
