BACKGROUND & HISTORY

In the granitic region of the eastern deccan plateau, in a gently rolling area runs the small river Musi in a shallow valley. The region is dotted with low craggy ridges and hills and 'balancing boulders'. Hyderabad is a town on the bend of this river.

The area lay on the ancient north-south route. Megalithic culture (with big stone tombs) flourished here before the Mauryan and Satavahana rule. There were Buddhist monasteries in the area of Hyderabad too. A rocky crag called Golconda, used as a lookout by shepherds was gradually fortified right from the beginning of the Christian era. The Chalukyas have left carved stone walls in Golconda. The Kakatiyas and successors including Qutub Shahs continued to build stone walls and carved gates.

Hyderabad city was built by Sultan Qutub Shah in 1591 as a planned city. Travel writers from Portugal and France of those days wrote about it in glowing terms. The qutub shahis went in for a lot of civil engineering, works which still stand and are used by people today like a stone bridge, causeway, lake etc. The Mughals, and then the local governor of the Mughals took over, styling himself as "Nizam", with a state called Hyderabad and capital at Hyderabad. The British slowly took over behind the scenes and built their military camp at Secunderabad.

Because development was uneven and distribution really skewed, there was a communist uprising in the late forties which finally ended with the Indian government taking over the whole of Hyderabad state. Since then it has been a pleasant half-dreamy sort of place punctuated with occasional riots.

While some light industry was sparked off by locating large defence labs ( like the one which designs Indian ballistic missiles) there was not much change, really. However the bulk drug industry is prominent even today. In recent times IT has grabbed centrestage.

Curiously, long time residents insist Hyderabad is still not a "big city" at all. Thus it retains the pleasant pace and unhurried charm of a provincial town, while slowly acquiring the benefits of a metropolis. The roads network is getting a long overdue spruce-up, for instance with twelve flyovers - all at the same time. When these are completed, the appearance of the city will change. Right now Hyderabad is in its bouts of expansion. Fueled by the demands from IT expansion, far away outlying areas are developed as campuses for IT firms. The next phase of expansion due to begin soon will encompass areas further away, this time for the biotech industry.

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