The Creators of 'Crater Hyderabad'

If anyone is looking for proof that will illustrate the popular adage about the cure being worse than the disease then they needn’t go far to find it. They can find sufficient proof and lots of it right here in Hyderabad. They only have to step out of their houses and look down at the road they’re standing on to find the evidence staring at them in the face.

Nowhere in the world do roads become filled with potholes as fast they do in Hyderabad. Hardly does the road roller disappear around the bend after laying a new road than the electricity/water board/phone cable guys make their appearance. Jackhammers in hand they dig up the new laid road like they are looking for buried treasure and leave behind potholes and craters for us to marvel at for eternity. I agree that there is nothing more heartbreaking then finding a newly laid road dug up but what happens later is more backbreaking. I’d be happy if they let the potholes be since we get used to them in no time, but when the engineers decide to fix the potholes it is time to worry.

Often I get the feeling that in the near future, if it hasn’t happened already, the roads of Hyderabad are going to put us on the global map, courtesy of our civic engineers. The day is also not far off when we will have a different kind of tourists in the form of engineers from all over the world who will fly down to Hyderabad to study, among other things, the manholes of Hyderabad. Like Kolkata’s manholes Hyderabad’s manholes too will gain notoriety albeit for different reasons. One look at the manholes in Hyderabad and people wonder if the engineers are building manhole covers or monuments. The round manhole covers, rising a minimum of one foot above the surface of the road do resemble tombs. When one spots another manhole, inches away but with the manhole cover at least six inches below the surface of the road then one wonders, just wonders, if the engineers are building them like they should be or like they want them to. It seems to be the prevailing trend in Hyderabad, to do things as one wishes, especially when it comes to driving, so it is no wonder that the engineers too are following the trend.

A repaired pothole is worse than the actual pothole. And a repaired trench is worse than the actual trench dug across the road to lay pipes or cables. After the trench dug up across the road is repaired by our engineers it assumes the form of a speed breaker which in Hyderabad resembles a small tunnel. Apart from that there’s the debris and the dug up bitumen which soon solidifies and becomes another obstacle the drivers have to look out for.

One can go on and on about the roads, the potholes and such things our engineers so casually create. As it happens I travel regularly on a stretch of road described recently in the columns of ‘The Hindu’ as the worst stretch of road in Hyderabad- the stretch of road from Musheerabad to Kavadiguda. No wonder it makes me qualified to write about the bad roads in Hyderabad in case anyone is wondering what makes me do it again and again.