The demands in full

Institutional and legal demands

One river, one basin, one authority. Today the Musi is split between six agencies, and each one can point at another when something goes wrong. These four demands fix the responsibility in law, through an Act of the Legislative Assembly, and put the river's real numbers in public before any concrete is poured.

• Establish a Musi River Basin Authority. Create it through a Legislative Assembly Act, with power over the whole 11,212 square kilometre basin, from the Anantagiri Hills where the river starts to the point where it joins the Krishna.
• Consolidate the power in one place. Give the Authority jurisdiction over land use, water quality and groundwater protection, so responsibility stops being split across six different agencies.
• Write transparency into the law. Require the Authority by statute to publish annual reports built on measurable ecological data, and to bring independent experts and civil society into the planning.
• Do the baseline study first. Publish a full study of the river's health, including pharmaceutical contamination (drug factory chemicals in the water) and water levels, before a rupee is spent on physical construction.

Pollution and development demands

Clean the water first. A riverfront built over untreated sewage is make-up on a wound. These four demands stop the construction, build the treatment the state already costed in 2019, and refuse the trick of adding clean water to hide dirty water.

• Halt the riverfront construction. Stop all physical work, plazas and embankments included, until a verified sewage treatment system is working across the whole project area.
• Build the 21 sewage treatment plants from the 2019 plan. CSIR-NEERI, the national research lab the government itself asked, identified them and put the cost at Rs 2,34,000 lakhs. The money was budgeted. The work never started.
• Audit and regulate the industrial waste. Bring independent auditors into the Patancheru industrial corridor and enforce the rules, so drug factory chemicals stop entering the food chain.
• End the dilution tactic. Drop the plan to pump Godavari water into the Musi to hide the pollution. The job is to stop the 1,800 million litres of sewage that enter the river every day.

Catchment and environmental demands

The Musi is not only the 21 km the plan has drawn. It is also the hills, lakes and streams that fill it. These four demands protect the land that holds the city's water, so the river has something to carry.

• Reinstate and strengthen GO 111. Bring back the order that protected 1.32 lakh acres around Osman Sagar and Himayat Sagar, the city's main drinking water reservoirs, and add a ban on all mining and quarrying inside that area.
• Notify the floodplains officially. Give the Musi floodplains formal notified status and restore the boundary pillars for Himayat Sagar and Osman Sagar, so anyone can see where the protected line runs.
• Rewrite the HMDA Master Plan around water. Make water zones a protected category in the city's master plan, one that cannot be rezoned for buildings or roads.
• Treat the forests as infrastructure. Protect the forest patches left in the basin as high priority public works, and restore trees along every tributary stream.

Consultation with residents and everyone the river touches

The movement set its consultation demands under this heading at the workshop, and the source document ends at the heading. We will not invent the text that is missing. For now the movement's consultation asks are on the How page of this site: real, written talks with the families who live along the Musi, of the kind the movement held in the field at Nagole and Hydershakote, together with the eight demands the people of the bastis wrote themselves. This section will carry the full text as soon as it is supplied.