Activists in Hyderabad are irked after production work at the foothill of the town’s famed Golconda Fort resumed this week. Protests over the remaining months had compelled authorities to halt the job temporarily.
Activists allege that once used to keep water as a defense mechanism, the moat is now being destroyed to develop a drain. The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is reportedly planning the stormwater drain, which is constructing a pipeline from the Shah Hatam lake nearby.
Armed with photographs that display earth movers getting used for digging and reducing rocks adjacent to the wall, activists warn that this could doubtlessly cause cracks along the structure’s floor and eventually do much more damage.
Speaking to TNM, activist Mohammed Afzal, Convenor of Heritage Watch and Association for Protection of Civil Rights, says, “The production hobby genuinely threatens the structure and is a contravention of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (AMASR) Act. There isn’t any clarity from the GHMC on whether they have taken the desired permission. Which is to blame if the wall adjacent to the moat collapses the day after today? It is utter negligence and apathy from the country’s government.”
“It is likewise unclear whether or not the GHMC has permission from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to accomplish that, even though officials on the ground are saying that they’ve received the whole lot required for the venture, including all permissions,” Afzal brought.
The fort is listed as a historical past shape and comes under the jurisdiction of the ASI. Any creation interest inside a one-hundred-meter radius without prior permission is illegitimate.
The activist has also filed an RTI seeking info on the project and the permissions to perform the development work with heavy machinery.
Dating again to the 12 months of 1143, while it became a dust citadel before being fortified within the 14th and seventeenth centuries, the metropolis of Golconda changed into the important capital of the Qutub Shahi kings before the metropolis of Hyderabad turned into deliberate and constructed on the banks of the Musi river within the seventeenth century.
