HYDERABAD: Basking in the admiration for being the metro city with the highest growth in green cover (as per the recent Forest Survey Report), the Telangana Forest Department is planning to ready many more urban forest parks beyond ORR. In the next six months, two more parks — at Kajaypally and Mambapur — will be readied for Hyderabadis.
The two parks will be among the 56 others to come up in 2022-23, adding to the State’s green cover and furthering it’s eco-tourism efforts. “In and around the GHMC limits, we have 59 urban forest parks and several other forest patches, which take the city’s green cover to 1.6 lakh acres,” RM Dobriyal, PCCF, Telangana Haritha Haram State Nodal Officer, said.
The goal, he notes, is to add such parks to every major municipality in the State and make eco-education, recreation and conservation commonplace. “We are also identifying suitable locations which receive high footfall and where more facilities such as night stays, education centres and watchtowers can be added,” he said. Currently, every park, on an average, sees 2,000-3,000 visitors, with 5,000 visiting KBR Park alone.
In each of these parks, five-ten per cent of the area is dedicated for the visitors zone and the remaining is for the conservation zone. With the recent launch of an app to locate these parks easily, the department hopes to add more features to the Telangana Urban Forest Parks app as well. The app currently shows the locations of 39 parks within the HMDA limits, apart from offering several other features. The officials hope to map all other parks, too, on the app.
Rising green cover