Residents living in low-lying areas of Hyderabad were evacuated yesterday and IT firms asked their employees to work from home as days of rain led to floods in the technology hub, officials and news reports said.
The National Disaster Response Force and the Indian Army were supporting relief and rescue operations in Hyderabad and several other districts, according to an official in the office of Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao.
The floods brought on by monsoon rains that have been ongoing since Tuesday inundated several districts of Telangana and parts of Hyderabad city, the capital of the state.
IT companies have been advised to give employees a holiday or ask them to work from home until the situation has improved, Telangana’s Information Technology Secretary Jayesh Ranjan said.
“If the situation gets worse the BCP (business continuity plan) will kick in,” B V R Mohan Reddy, chairman of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), said.
Under the BCP, work is transferred to other IT hubs in the country.
Google, IBM, Infosys and TCS are among top IT firms with major operations in Hyderabad.
The rains showed no signs of abating yesterday, with the Indian Metereological Department forecasting heavy to very heavy showers for the next four days.
The army and NDRF personnel swung into action in the worst-affected areas of Begumpet, Nizampet, Hakimpet and Alwal, where dozens of residential areas remained under water.
Four columns of army have been deployed in the affected areas.
It has also set up a control room at the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) office.
According to a defence statement, the army, in co-ordination with the GHMC and NDRF officials, is closely monitoring the situation on the ground round the clock.
“Army columns are already on track to provide relief material and medical aid in the slum areas of Alwal. Other columns of the army have been kept on standby, to be deployed when required,” said the statement.
There was no respite for flooded residential colonies in Alwal, Kukatpally, Miyapur, Nizampet and Begumpet, as rain continued to lash the city.
Locals saved 40 children when a school bus was stuck in flood water in Dharaninagar in Kukatpally yesterday morning. The driver ignored the warning and tried to pass through the flood water, according to eyewitnesses.
The children belonged to a private school, which was open despite the government declaring a two-day holiday for all educational institutions in the city.
Telangana Deputy Chief Minister Kadiam Srihari said action would be taken against schools, which were open despite the government orders.
Train travel was also disrupted and people had to be airlifted to safety from several low-lying areas.
Meanwhile, people in inundated areas were facing shortage of food, drinking water and other essential items.
Some non-governmental organisations were seen distributing food, milk and water packets.
Over 200 apartments in Bhandari Layout in Nizampet on the city’s outskirts remained inundated for the fourth day.
Minister for Municipal Administration K T Rama Rao and other state ministers and officials of the GHMC visited some of the areas late Friday night and yesterday morning.
Normally this region of India avoids the heaviest of the summer monsoon rains. It is sheltered by the Western Ghats, a mountain range that runs parallel to the west coast of India.
This ensures that Hyderabad normally receives 165mm of rain in September, far less than Mumbai’s average of 264mm.
However, this month has been far wetter than usual in Hyderabad.
In just two days of this week, Wednesday and Thursday, Hyderabad was swamped by 160mm rain, almost the entire average expected in the month.
Despite the excessive amount of rain seen recently in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, as a whole, India has seen 4% less rain than average this year.
Ironically it has been the eastern and northeastern parts of the country that have seen the greatest deficiency.