The Drowned World

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              "text": "Residents of Hafiz Baba Nagar haul their belongings to safety as the Gurram Cheruvu, a lake in the Balapur locality of Hyderabad, breaches its banks on 18 October and causes flash floods in the surrounding areas. Hafiz Baba Nagar lies just north of the lake, and several of its residents were stranded as their houses were completely submerged and all their possessions destroyed by the rising waters. The city and its surrounding regions had witnessed heavy rains since at least 9 October and the downpour continued for over the next ten days.",
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              "text": "On 18 October, the Mantrala Cheruvu, also known as the Meerpet Lake, overflows its banks and inundates neighbouring localities. Hyderabad has around 2,800 lakes spread across the city, in a network connected by natural waterways, and majority of these lead to the Musi River. Most of these natural waterways, however, are now defunct or dried up and have been settled.",
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              "text": "On 21 October, floodwater recedes and reveals cars and bikes completely buried under the sand and slush, in the Subhan Colony of the Bandlaguda locality. As the city lacks a proper drainage system, several areas were waterlogged even a week after the rains subsided.",
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              "text": "The Uma Maheshwara Colony near the Fox Sagar Lake still lies submerged on 23 October, ten days after record-breaking rainfall battered Hyderabad. Several such colonies have been built on and in areas which were the natural buffer zones for lakes or now defunct natural waterways that connected the lakes to the Musi. When the lakes breached, such colonies were the first to be flooded and witnessed the highest water levels which have taken weeks to recede.",
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              "text": "Residents of the Hafiz Baba Nagar stranded on the roadside on 18 October, with the meagre belongings they saved, as the Gurram Cheruvu breaches its banks. The lake’s levels had begun rising on 13 October. When the lake overflowed, the water levels in surrounding areas rose to almost five feet.",
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              "text": "In the Subhan Colony area of Hyderabad, just a gate survives the floods and the accompanying silt, on 21 October. Several localities have struggled as the floodwaters receded and left behind silt, slush, sludge and the waste of the city all mixed together. ",
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              "text": "A boy holds on to a catfish he caught in the flooded streets of Hafiz Baba Nagar, on 18 October. This area witnessed flash floods due to breaches in the Gurram Cheruvu. According to media reports, the flooding caused by the lake may have been partially man-made as the authorities cut off a part of the Balapur Bund that evening and by the middle of the night the lake’s waters had completely broken the bund.",
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              "text": "The remains of two houses destroyed by a boundary wall that collapsed in Ghouse Nagar, a locality in Tad Bun in southern Hyderabad, on 21 October. Nine days before, flooding weakened the foundations of a wall of the neighbouring compound, which was at a height. The wall fell and killed eight members from the two houses, four of them children.",
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              "text": "On 21 October, a man wades past the sludge deposited in the wake of the floods in Nadeem Colony, a locality in the Toli Chowki area of Hyderabad. The colony is one among several low-lying settlements in the city. In the days following the floods, residents of such colonies struggled to clean households, streets, alleyways and even material possessions. Waterlogged drains and silt were joined by destroyed material goods at a massive scale and created a stinking, unhealthy nightmare for the city’s denizens.",
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              "text": "The water recedes and leaves a mark of the height it had reached inside a house in the Hafiz Baba Nagar, on 18 October.",
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              "text": "A ladder, the only way to enter the house during the floods as the ground floor was submerged, still stands next to the building, in the Hafiz Baba Nagar, on 18 October. According to media reports, on the first day of the floods, the water levels rose to12 feet in parts of the Nadeem Colony, which lies next to the Shah Hatim Talab. Hafiz Baba Nagar and Al Jubail Colony, among several others, witnessed the water rise to over four feet. ",
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              "text": "A temporary embankment is being constructed to reduce the flow of the water from the Gurram Cheruvu, on 18 October. According to media reports, the lake has two exit gates to allow outflow of excess water. One of the gates did not function as it had been blocked and surrounding areas had been encroached upon. The reports noted that had the gates functioned properly, the excessive flooding may have been avoided.",
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              "text": "A mini truck, which collapsed due to the swift overflow of Gurram Cheruvu, lies unclaimed among the water hyacinth, on 18 October, near the Hafiz Baba Nagar. As per the municipal administration, the city suffered losses to the tune of Rs 670 crore.  ",
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              "text": "A family of flower sellers salvages their belongings from their house in Saroornagar on 20 October, as their locality is flooded by the overflowing Saroornagar Lake. On 19 October, the chief minister of Telangana Kalvakuntla Chandrashekhar Rao announced aid of Rs 10,000 for every flood-affected household as gratuitous relief, in addition to financial aid of Rs 1 lakh for damaged houses, and Rs 50,000 for partially damaged houses. By some estimates, by that day, almost 37,000 families had been affected in the city.",
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On 13 October, an atmospheric depression, an intense low-pressure area, triggered record-breaking rainfall in parts of Telangana, with the capital city Hyderabad one of the worst affected. The rainfall continued through the night and till the next day, and caused floods and flash floods. The neighbouring states of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra affected, too. Parts of Hyderabad witnessed the highest rain for the month of October in a century. The incessant rain caused the Musi River, which flows through the city, to overflow late on 13 October itself and scores of the city’s lakes overflooded, submerging several localities and hundreds of colonies. In some areas the water reached almost twelve feet high. By the evening of 14 October, the state government had called in the National Disaster Response Force and the army to conduct rescue operations of people stranded across the city, and the state. The rain continued unabated for the next five days causing further damage.

The state government has pegged losses from the floods at around Rs 9,000 crore. While there are no official figures yet, media reports suggest that around sixty people have been killed by the floods and its immediate aftermath, with 33 deaths in Hyderabad alone. Areas like the Al-Jubail colony, in the Faluknama locality of the city, and Hafiz Baba Nagar were still struggling to cope a week after the floods. The damage was particularly bad in areas close to the Musi, such as the Chaderghat Bridge and its surroundings, whose residents have lost all their material possessions. The last time the city witnessed flooding and damage to this degree was in 1908. Several experts have blamed the floods on poorly planned urbanisation, damage to the Musi and the lack of drainage systems. Meanwhile, the state government has announced an aid package for those who lost their homes, but the residents have criticised it as being paltry compared to the scale of the devastation.