HYDERABAD: Hyderabad may be heading for a full-scale urban water crisis, with environmentalists warning that the city is entering a “now or never” phase as groundwater reserves shrink year after year and authorities continue to rely on temporary fixes instead of long-term water security measures.
With the India Meteorological Department warning of possible El Niño conditions developing by late May or early June, experts fear a weak monsoon could push the city into one of its worst water emergencies in recent memory. If El Niño coincides with a negative Indian Ocean Dipole, Telangana could face a major rainfall deficit this year — a scenario experts say Hyderabad is dangerously unprepared for.
For a city already battling drying borewells, falling groundwater tables and soaring tanker dependence, even a modest monsoon shortfall could have cascading consequences across households, apartment complexes, industries and urban supply systems.
Environmentalists warn Hyderabad has reached a stage where every failed monsoon directly threatens the city’s ability to survive the following summer.
“Whatever rain comes, that’s all you may get. If you fail to capture it now, you lose it forever,” says Kalpana Ramesh, founder of The Rainwater Project. Comparing the situation to the “golden hour” after a medical emergency, she says Hyderabad is rapidly exhausting a critical window to revive groundwater reserves.
Experts say decades of unchecked urbanisation have slowly destroyed the city’s natural recharge systems. Lakes have shrunk, nalas have been encroached upon, open land has disappeared and vast stretches of Hyderabad are now buried under concrete, preventing rainwater from entering the ground.
“Twenty years ago, rainwater could still seep into the soil through open spaces. Today, almost every surface is concretised. Every apartment, every commercial complex and every gated community should be harvesting rainwater. There is no alternative anymore,” Kalpana says.
City expanding, groundwater reserves shrinking
Many experts now fear Hyderabad may be approaching a point where restoring depleted groundwater reserves becomes extremely difficult.
The warning signs are already visible in official figures.
In a recent survey, the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board found more than 40,000 residential complexes regularly booking more than 20 private water tankers every month. Nearly 17,000 of them had no percolation pits at all, while another 22,000 had poorly maintained or ineffective rainwater harvesting systems.
Experts say the numbers expose how the city has continued expanding without securing its water future beneath the ground.
Prof Purshottam Reddy says rainwater harvesting regulations had effectively collapsed in implementation.
“Today, it exists mostly on paper. Very little is functioning properly on the ground,” he says.
According to him, successive administrations failed to use previous monsoons to prepare Hyderabad for inevitable drought years.
“The first priority should have been storage. The second should have been groundwater recharge. Both should have been made compulsory years ago. Instead, the city kept expanding while its groundwater reserves kept shrinking,” he warns.
The crisis is intensifying even as Hyderabad undergoes rapid urban expansion through policies such as Transferable Development Rights (TDR), which permit additional floors and denser construction. Experts argue that lakhs of people are being added to the city without matching recharge infrastructure.
“If builders are getting permissions for additional floors, then large-scale rainwater harvesting should be non-negotiable,” says environmental expert Donthi Narasimha Reddy. “You cannot keep adding concrete while destroying the city’s groundwater lifeline.”
The growing pressure is already visible in daily water supply patterns.
Official figures show Hyderabad recorded 2.85 lakh tanker bookings in April alone, compared with 2.24 lakh in March, reflecting growing dependence on private water supply as borewells fail earlier every summer. Experts warn the growing tanker economy is only masking a far deeper collapse underneath the city.
“Simply increasing the number of water tankers is not a solution. It is a sign of failure,” Narasimha Reddy says. “Even a 10% fall in rainfall can severely affect agriculture, urban supply systems and industry. Population growth, rising temperatures and groundwater depletion are all converging at the same time.”
He says governments were fully aware of the solutions but had repeatedly failed to act with urgency despite years of warnings. Referring to successful conservation efforts near Zaheerabad, he says Telangana already had working local models that could have been replicated on a larger scale.
“The awareness exists. The science exists. The warnings exist. What is missing is seriousness,” Narasimha Reddy says.
Experts also question why aggressive rainwater harvesting drives were not launched soon after last year’s monsoon despite repeated warnings about extreme heat and possible rainfall deficits this year.
“We are already entering peak summer. Meteorological agencies have been warning about this for months. Why was there no emergency preparation? Why were recharge structures not built on a large scale after the last monsoon?” experts ask.
Environmentalists warn Hyderabad can no longer treat rainwater harvesting as an optional environmental exercise or a symbolic building requirement. They say the city is fast approaching a stage where groundwater exhaustion could become a recurring urban emergency even during normal summers.
“Every drop flowing into a drain today is water Hyderabad may desperately need tomorrow,” says a rooftop rainwater harvesting advocate.
Experts warn the coming monsoon could determine whether Hyderabad stabilises its declining groundwater reserves — or slips deeper into a cycle of tanker dependence, borewell failures and recurring summer water emergencies that may become harder to reverse with every passing year.