Khairatabad’s iconic vertical garden withers due to lack of watering

Hyderabad's once-popular vertical garden at Khairatabad Junction has fallen into disrepair due to poor maintenance and water shortages. The GHMC project, inaugurated in 2020 at a cost of over Rs 32 lakh, featured 14,000 plants arranged to spell "HYDERABAD".

Hyderabad: The iconic vertical garden at the bustling Khairatabad Junction, once celebrated as a lush green oasis amid urban concrete chaos, has turned into a dreary eyesore.

The city’s costly green-wall beautification project has rapidly deteriorated because of inadequate watering and official negligence, angering thousands of daily commuters.

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A vertical garden spelling “HYDERABAD” with plants at Khairatabad junction, once a busy selfie point offering a lush green backdrop for photographs, has turned barren and lost its aesthetic appeal.

Urban Biodiversity officials at the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) built the vertical garden on the right side while coming from the Telangana Secretariat and Khairatabad flyover to a height of 10 ft and a length of 260 ft.

It had 14,000 plants of 10 species including Crossostephium chinense (white), duranta (yellow), amaranthus or iresine (red), alternanthera, vulcameria, buxus and tradescantia spathacea, making it a rare vertical garden in Hyderabad.

The GHMC spent over Rs 32 lakh and inaugurated it in 2020 during the BRS regime.

All 14,000 plants were recently removed from the vertical garden after they dried up because of a water shortage, affecting its appearance, a senior GHMC-UBD (Urban Biodiversity) official said.

The contractor had been assigned responsibility for maintaining the greenery and watering the plants daily through a drip irrigation system, but the water shortage forced the removal of the vertical garden, the official added.

The apathy of the civic administration in protecting and nurturing the green wall and abandoning routine maintenance and watering despite spending lakhs of rupees to set up the framework, has has led to the drying up of a major city attraction.