What can be said about Hyderabad?
A city? A metropolitan in the making? An urban area?
Hmmm.
I doubt this idea, of calling Hyderabad a city! Why?
Any city requires the kind of citizens that know how to live and work in a city, how to go about traveling in it. Also it requires the kind of planning that is so lacking in this "city". If one wants to see what I mean, just have a look at the traffic movement in our "city". Be assured it is going to tell you a lot about the kind of people that live here! And the municipality of this place? I don't have to write it here for those who live in Hyderabad. Their work speaks for themselves!
Through ad-hoc and senseless growth in the infrastructure, the authorities are trying to "develop" this "city", and, duh, turn it into a "metropolitan"! Rest assured, this is impossible!! I repeat, impossible! The reason for this: the people! The citizens who live and work here! They apparently do not know what it means to be in a city, except for a very few.
We Indians, generally, have a tendency to live a carefree life. However, an urban life has some expectations from the ones who are living it. It demands us to be more responsible and conscious of our surroundings, and asks us to have some civic sense, some idea of how we can make our stay in it comfortable. We have lived our lives (our fathers and fore-fathers) in villages mostly. The kind of life that exists there is quite simple and straightforward, without the complexities of an urban area. We do not need to follow a code of conduct so much there. Population density is usually low due to being spread out to a vast area. It seems as though the urban life has been given to us, from outside, while we were still unprepared or under-prepared for it. The growth is not organic. We, the people, were never taught or we never learned what it means to be in a city, the kind of conduct that we need to practice to have that good city life. Even our education system (syllabus) ignores this aspect of teaching. Under these conditions, no matter how much "development" you bring, doesn't matter how many concrete structures, skyscrapers or flyovers you erect, Hyderabad will still lag behind of being called a city.
It can be argued that the population is a bit too much for managing the "city" properly. Agreed, population is a problem but not the real problem. The real problem lies in the over migration of people (from rural areas and far away towns), and in the lopsided government policies that encourages such an exodus. The post '91 India saw a heavy movement from villages and towns to big "cities". It was the mid 1990's, the IT "boom" and with it, the growth in real estate that led to the manifold increase in the population in Hyderabad, thereby increasing the pressure on the scarce resources of the "city", especially its water table. If only the authorities had properly handled the "boom", there wouldn't have been so much of chaos as we see it today here. For instance, instead of concentrating all the IT companies in Hyderabad, they could have been distributed in the upcoming towns like Vizag or Vijaywada or any other. People would naturally like to work in areas which are nearer to their native places. However, this did not happen and so the "urban" chaos.
After all the criticism, there is still some hope that people would realize. What about the authorities? Well, they won't do anything unless we do. They know how we are. After all, they come from among us!!
