It’s little more than two years since the Hyderabad Metro Rail project piers (pillars) surfaced followed by road widening in different places, demolition of properties, shifting of utility pipelines – water, sewer, storm water, power, telephone and others.
Properties demolished to make way for metro rail or heritage structures that came ‘under threat’ due to the overhead viaduct and so on led to several protests and criticism. While this is one side of the story, metro rail authorities have also been onto something ‘constructive’.
They have been and are giving a fresh lease of life to several government buildings, including primary schools, revenue offices, police stations, barracks, etc., in the last couple of years. In the place of the dilapidated, crumbling and cramped edifices – new swanky buildings with modern amenities have come up and will come up in future as well. While some old buildings had to be removed as they were too close to the metro rail viaduct or the overhead stations, a few volunteered to surrender the land on being assured of new structures. Revenue Division Office in Nampally was the first beneficiary, and much to the envy of other government officials, the new building got ready last year and had begun to function from then. The second RDO office in the remaking is at Secunderabad. “Across the 73-km metro rail corridors in three lines, we have had quite a few government buildings and when we made an offer to construct them afresh, some departments accepted our proposal,” explains Hyderabad Metro Rail (HMR) managing director N.V.S. Reddy.
Construction of four police barracks has been taken up behind Shahinayatgunj police station complex at a cost of Rs. 8.64 crore and yet another barrack is under construction at City College, opposite Ghansibazar, at a cost of Rs. 7.92 crore. Both these buildings and another one at Rasoolpura are five-storied ones. Gopalapuram police station too is brand new.
A ‘Sanik Aramgarh’ is being built on the old Gandhi Hospital land, another four-storied building for the benefit of the armed forces personnel with an easy access to Secunderabad railway station, explain metro rail officials. Besides, at least eight government schools at Chaderghat and Kukatpally got new buildings. While the first school complex has 40,000 sq.ft. built up space (Rs. 5.5 crore), the second one at Kukatpally has 25,125 sq.ft space (Rs. 4 crore) – four floors each. “Both these schools were in a bad shape earlier and we demolished the old buildings because of road widening,” said a senior metro rail engineer.
A novel commercial complex is also ready for opening at Putlibowli. It has two cellars and seven floors and a ‘replica of Sultan Bazaar vertically’, as an official put it.
