The recent delimitation exercise to carve out 300 new wards within the expanded Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) has sparked significant public outcry. Residents have flagged numerous serious inconsistencies in the proposed map, leading to administrative confusion and identity concerns across the city.
Wards Straddling Multiple Jurisdictions
The GHMC has received over 6,000 objections from concerned citizens. A primary issue is the creation of wards that bizarrely fall under the jurisdiction of multiple police stations and even different police commissionerates. In several instances, a single proposed ward now spans areas covered by both the Hyderabad and Cyberabad commissionerates, or Hyderabad and Rachakonda.
This overlap is not limited to police boundaries. The newly formed Mettuguda ward presents an extreme case where residents would have to deal with two Members of Parliament (Secunderabad and Malkajgiri) and two MLAs (Secunderabad and Uppal) for routine civic and administrative work. They would also need to approach two different revenue offices.
P Mohan Rao, president of the Tarnaka Welfare Association, pleaded for a correction, stating that Vijayapuri Colony should be moved from Mettuguda to Tarnaka ward. He emphasized the colony's long-standing functional, geographical, and administrative integration with Tarnaka, warning that deviations would create unnecessary complications.
Loss of Local Identity and Clarity
Beyond jurisdictional nightmares, the delimitation threatens local historical and cultural identities. In Shaikpet, residents are upset that a historically significant village ward with nearly 10 polling booths is being merged with a much smaller colony, OU Colony.
"Old Shaikpet village has a distinct historical, ethnic, and cultural identity," explained resident P Charan Kumar. "OU Colony is only a part of the old village and is geographically and population-wise much smaller, with two polling booths compared to 10–20 in old Shaikpet."
Adding to the confusion, many residents are now unsure about which ward they belong to. CSN Sharma, a resident of Anitha Enclave in Kapra Division, expressed the prevailing uncertainty. He pointed out that their colony names do not appear as border colonies, and despite the creation of a new Yapral ward, there is no clarity on whether they fall under Kapra or Yapral.
Administrative Impact and Resident Warnings
Residents and civic activists warn that these illogical overlaps will have severe real-world consequences. They predict confusion in law enforcement and legal proceedings, as police jurisdictions become blurred. Even day-to-day civic affairs will be negatively impacted, as colonies that traditionally functioned as a single unit are now arbitrarily split across multiple wards.
The case of Errakunta and Karthikeyanagar in the Tarnaka ward exemplifies this. Residents have objected to their areas being split between the Hyderabad and Rachakonda police commissionerates, arguing that these areas have distinct boundaries, administrative jurisdictions, and civic identities that have been governed separately for a long time.
The overwhelming number of objections indicates that the current draft of the GHMC ward delimitation requires serious reconsideration to avoid creating a permanent administrative labyrinth for Hyderabad's citizens.
