Ring of concrete: The seven flyovers that will cost Hyderabad a national park

At dawn, the Indian Grey Hornbill cruises over the Jubilee Hills police checkpost, five to 12 metres above the road, following a flight corridor that hornbills have used for longer than the city has existed. By 2028, if the Hyderabad City Innovative and Transformative Infrastructure (HCITI) project proceeds as tendered, four flyovers between 10 and 14 metres high will cut through this same airspace. 

However, the ecological concern extends beyond just those four structures. The HCITI is a large urban transport and road-infrastructure programme being executed by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) with a budget of nearly Rs 1,100 crore. It includes seven flyovers and seven underpasses encircling the Kasu Brahmananda Reddy (KBR) National Park. 

KBR National Park is one of India’s rare protected urban forests embedded within a dense metropolitan core, frequently described by courts and public, as the last remaining “lungs of the city”. Spread over roughly 390-400 acres in Jubilee Hills, the park contains dry deciduous vegetation, granitic rock ecosystems, recharge zones, and a surprisingly diverse urban wildlife population including Indian Grey Hornbills, peafowl, civets, monitor lizards, parakeets, owls, raptors, and pollinator species. The park functions not merely as a recreational green space, but as a climate-regulating ecological core for western Hyderabad, moderating temperatures, enabling groundwater recharge, reducing particulate pollution, and serving as a biological refuge within one of India’s fastest-growing urban heat islands. 

The question Hyderabad has not asked is what do seven simultaneous road projects do to a 400-acre National Park?

The answer, garnered from the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) tender documents, is alarming. The combined package-I and package-II tenders, issued on December 27, 2024, describe Rs 1,090 crore worth of infrastructure. The structural deck spans 79,723 square metres, equivalent to 11 FIFA football grounds of concrete placed 12 metres high, made using 29,305 tonnes of cement. The project got 1,942 mature trees approved for felling in a single sitting of the Tree Protection Committee on April 29, 2025, and 332 properties acquired under an emergency clause that bypassed mandatory public hearings and social impact assessment entirely. On May 18, The Supreme Court stayed any tree felling activity around the eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) of Hyderabad’s KBR national park.

Moreover, the flyovers and underpasses will cause canopy fragmentation, removal of nesting and feeding trees, increased night lighting, traffic noise amplification, heat-island intensification from elevated concrete decks, and other concerns.

What the science says

A functioning forest extends its ecological services up to a 100 metres outward from its physical edge. HCITI erects 12-metre concrete walls on every side of the KBR National Park - the first time the entire buffer of any Indian national park is removed in a single construction cycle. Island-biogeography literature predicts a 15–20 percent resident-bird extinction debt within two decades of such isolation. 

Four of the seven flyovers sit squarely in the five-to-12-metre flight band used by KBR’s signature species: the grey hornbill, the shikra, the rose-ringed Parakeet.

The hydrological damage is equally irreversible. Seven underground sumps and 2.1 kilometres of reinforced cement concrete (RCC) pipes will divert monsoon run-off from the park’s recharge zone straight into the Musi sewer network. 

Banjara and Jubilee Hills already sit at the Central Ground Water Board’s ‘over-exploited’ threshold. Pre-monsoon water tables here have fallen from 12 metres below ground in 2015 to 20 metres in 2023. The 1,942 trees being removed are the engineered margin between paved road and forest floor; hydrological literature (see here, here, and here) records a 40–60 percent drop in near-surface infiltration within the first monsoon after such clearance.

KBR also contains the perennial Chiran Lake, fed entirely by diffuse recharge through the surrounding canopy and subsurface flow. Ring the park with eight underground sumps and you have removed the lake’s catchment before touching its surface. In the standard arc of denuded urban water bodies, it takes a decade to go from hydrological severance to shrub-choked puddle. There is no line item in the tender for restoring this, because the tender does not acknowledge that the lake depends on what it is about to ring above the road.

Meanwhile, NRSC-ISRO satellite data show Banjara and Jubilee Hills running two to three degrees cooler than the rest of the city, solely because of the KBR-Filmnagar canopy. The India Meteorological Department logged 31 heatwave days in Hyderabad in 2023, against 12 in 2015. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment projects Deccan heatwave days rising 2.5-fold by 2050. HCITI removes the very canopy that keeps this pocket of the city liveable in that future.

Death by a thousand narrow exemptions

None of this triggers an environmental impact assessment. The 2006 EIA Notification covers highway projects of 30 kilometres or more; HCITI is classified as urban road widening. Each of the seven junctions sits below this threshold. Indian law contains no requirement for cumulative assessment of projects that collectively ring a protected area. 

The KBR Eco-Sensitive Zone, notified in 2020, has stretches as narrow as three metres; most HCITI works technically sit outside it.

There is a second story hiding in the tender. The original 2015 proposal for this corridor included tunnel options. Tunnels trigger environmental clearance because regulators recognise the hydrological violence of boring beneath a living landscape. HCITI has quietly replaced tunnels with ‘vehicular underpasses’, which are open-cut box sections excavated in trench rather than bored. 

In engineering terms, this is a tunnel laid open to the sky. In ecological terms, it is worse: the entire root zone and saturated soil layer is removed and carted away rather than passed through. The regulatory relabelling converts an ecologically more destructive design into a legally less accountable one. That is not better engineering, but better evasion.

India has one precedent: Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai. Three large projects tested its legal protections: the Aarey metro car-shed, the Thane-Borivali tunnel, and the Ghodbunder Road widening. The NBWL and Maharashtra State Board for Wildlife clearance conditions on the latter two projects have crystallised two administrative-law expectations applicable to KBR Park: cumulative-impact and carrying-capacity studies are required wherever simultaneous projects touch a National Park, and Forest (Conservation) Act 1980 clearance is required wherever a project crosses forest land, even when surface works sit outside the notified boundary. 

Mumbai learned these lessons in court. Hyderabad still has the time not to.

What is needed now

Four things need to be done in the public interest:

1) An independent cumulative environmental impact assessment treating all seven projects as a single programme. 

2) Full public disclosure of the cement, steel, water, and spoil estimates — these are tender numbers, not state secrets. 

3) An alternatives audit: Dedicated bus lanes and signal optimisation deliver most of the claimed commute benefit at a fraction of the ecological cost. 

4) An interim stay on tree-felling pending consultation with the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change.

Ask also, who these flyovers are being built for. The state has not even prepared the statutory Zonal Master Plan to demonstrate a justification, method, or science behind such large-scale destruction of ecology. 

A recent traffic survey by the Hyderabad City Police found that the roads ringing KBR are dominated overwhelmingly by single-occupancy vehicles. That finding should give every decision-maker pause. Flyovers do not solve single-occupancy congestion; they invite more of it. Traffic engineers call it induced demand: build new road capacity and it fills, typically within three to five years, with the very vehicles it was meant to relieve. If the roads around KBR are already carrying mostly solo commuters, the ring of flyovers will not clear them. Instead, it will attract more. When that happens, the pressure to widen further, to cut deeper into the park’s edge, to add an eighth junction and a ninth, will follow as surely as it has in every other Indian city that chose concrete over public transport. 

A park that serves the lungs, the water table, and the mental health of lakhs of Hyderabadis is being placed in permanent peril for the daily convenience of a comparatively small set of single-passenger cars. That is not a trade-off that has been put to any public hearing, because no public hearing has been held.       

A single flyover can one day be pulled down. A ring of seven cannot. KBR is not an obstacle to Hyderabad’s growth. It is the lung that makes growth liveable. We are being asked to trade a marginal commute saving for a permanent ecological debt that no court will be able to repay.

Major Sandeep Khurana (Retd) is a sustainability researcher and environmentalist. He has contributed to public causes, including the conservation of national parks in Hyderabad.

Dr Narasimha Reddy Donthi is a researcher, campaigner, and an environmental justice activist. His writings and campaigns inform and capacitate people on environmental violations, economics, policies, and ways to secure justice.

Views expressed are the authors' own.

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