HC prods, HYDRAA says ‘outside FTL’
Court has been asking for answers on Salkam Cheruvu. The state showed a finalised FTL map and claimed the campus isn’t inside it. The rumoured contempt notices doing the rounds? Not backed by a court order yet.
The court is seeking records as agencies put the lake boundary on paper.
The Telangana High Court has been pressing Hyderabad agencies since April over construction linked to the Barrister Fatima Owaisi Educational Campus near Salkam (Surram) Cheruvu — asking why notices didn’t turn into action, and ordering senior departments to file records and counters. According to multiple reports of those hearings, the judge called it a larger public issue and reminded the state it is obligated to protect waterbodies. [Sources below]
By early July, the bench gave authorities a week to submit permissions, inquiry reports and approvals, warning it would pass orders if they stalled again. A week later, it was still unhappy with the pace and told HYDRAA, GHMC, HMDA, the Lake Protection Committee and School Education to file counters in four weeks, after earlier notices allegedly sat unanswered for over 90 days.
On the state’s side, HYDRAA told the court it has now finalised the Full Tank Level (FTL) notification for Surram/Salkam Cheruvu and, per that boundary, no construction falls inside the FTL. That position was placed on record through a memo in W.P. No. 11130 of 2026, citing inputs from GHMC, Irrigation and the Hyderabad Collector. The court has not published, in the accessible record, a finding accepting or rejecting that claim, and the buffer-zone question remains separate from FTL. HYDRAA’s commissioner earlier said the matter is under court supervision and that the agency will act after survey reports.
Meanwhile, a claim doing the rounds on Reddit that the High Court issued contempt notices to HYDRAA chief A.V. Ranganath and others on August 8–9 carries no linked order, case number or cause-list entry. Without a court document, it reads as a rumour, not a record. If the BJP-led Centre, the Congress in the state, or the TDP want to posture about lakes, they can start by helping agencies put the maps and orders on the table instead of letting them dribble out after judicial prods.