Ramakrishnapuram Lake

Ramakrishnapuram Lake, originally called Mukidigan Cheruvu, lies in the Ramakrishnapuram hamlet of Neredmet in Hyderabad, close to Ramakistapuram Gate railway station. Its exact date is unknown, but it was commissioned by the Nizam and excavated in the mid-1800s across about 100 acres, to supply water to the engineers at the military establishment in Trimulgherry and to the communities who settled around Neredmet to serve them.

For more than a century it was a clean source of drinking water. Its decline began after ECIL was set up in the late 1960s, when a road was laid across the lake; from the mid-1980s, new colonies upstream sent untreated sewage into it. The lake still attracts migratory birds, although pollution harms them and other wildlife, and GHMC efforts to control it have had limited success.