Millions of liters of sewerage mixed rainwater coursed through Hyderabad’s neighborhoods in October 2020. This event revealed fault lines in the city’s infrastructure that have been neglected for decades. Incremental land-use change in Hyderabad has resulted in thousands of acres of similar wetlands across the city disappearing. Yet, strictly in terms of revenue categories, the actual shrinkage of the lake area is negligible. The trick lies in the way land is categorized.
Hussainsagar, the pride of Hyderabad has no aquatic life to speak of anymore. A swampy wetland that once supported fish breeding and protected areas around it as a flood barrier has now become Necklace Road, serving purely aesthetic purposes.
This follows the logic of the Wasteland Atlas of India 2020. It identifies 17% of India’s surface area as wasteland. A complex terrain of grasslands, marshes, pastures, and water bodies, supporting enormous ecological diversity and livelihoods – all rendered waste with one simple categorization.
It’s time we recognized that in this idea of ‘waste’ lies the key to our urban future.
Wasteland is a land category invented in 17th century Europe in the throes of early capitalist production, commerce, and land-based empire building. In British India, it signified places that did not yield tax revenues or were not amenable to some kind of material extraction. The post-Independence Indian state too adopted this method. Banjar, gairan, gauche, gomala, gaonthan, poramboke — places without taxable economic activities became wastelands.
But local communities and cultures have always associated a range of use-values and cultural significance to these lands. Early revenue codes acknowledged these. Thanks to these codes, we still have forests, scrub jungles, grasslands, wetlands, swamps, and rocky slopes in our cities. Over time, land rent, the logic of economic value over social, moral, cultural, and ecological value became the overriding concern for all government institutions. Property markets rode roughshod over revenue codes related to ecologically sensitive places.
Depending on the nature of the lands, most of what are considered wastelands actually served some marginal economic utility. Rocky slopes of the Deccan plateau supported Cetaphil, Munjal, ber fruit – supported nutritional needs of the poor in Telangana. Marshy, swampy lands, foreshores of tanks – wetlands were breeding grounds for fish and a range of useful grasses and other vegetation. Singhadas – water chestnuts harvested from neighborhood tanks roasted and sold in markets are not yet a distant memory for many Hyderabadis.
Civil society actors have often laid the blame for environmental degradation on private builders backed by corrupt governments. While that may be true, environmental degradation is not possible without accompanying erosion of knowledge systems. Wetlands, marshes, commons have all been forgotten because the related revenue categories have been erased from our records. Existing land use classification in India does not recognize wetlands as water bodies. Rendered invisible, wetlands are only meaningful as potential real estate.
Fortunately, there is now a new generation of environmental activists in Hyderabad, quietly working away at permaculture, organic farming, rooftop gardens, or adventure sports and trekking guides, helping people reconnect and relearn the environment. These new environmentalists need constant support and networking. This is where new hope in civil society lies.
(The writer is a researcher at Hyderabad Urban Lab)
