Place · sultanate-era reservoir · India
Hussain Sagar, Hyderabad
Also known as Hussain Sagar, Hussainsagar, Tank Bund, Hussainsagar Lake
A fourteen-square-kilometre reservoir between Hyderabad and Secunderabad, built in 1563 under Ibrahim Quli Qutb Shah by the engineer Hussain Shah Wali as the city's water supply, which it was for three centuries. The lake connects Hyderabad to Secunderabad across a bund that is now Tank Bund Road, lined with statues of Telugu figures from Satavahana to the twentieth century that were installed in 1986. A monolithic Buddha of eighteen metres was placed on the Rock of Gibraltar island at its centre in 1992.
- Date
- 1563–None
- Function
- Water & infrastructure
- Patron dynasty
- Qutb Shahi
- River basin
- Krishna
- Tradition
- Qutb Shahi engineering records; Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board archives; contemporary municipal reports.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 17.424, 78.474
Worth knowing
The Buddha statue arrived from the Raigir quarry in 1988 but overturned a barge and sank in the lake; a salvage operation lifted and reinstalled it in 1992. The lake has been under heavy sewage load for decades and the clean-up has been a running municipal project since the 1990s. Hussain Shah Wali's own tomb stands on its northeast shore.
Connections (1)
- Site withinHyderabad
Hussain Sagar is the sultanate reservoir that defines modern Hyderabad's shape — the lake separates the walled city on the south from the Secunderabad cantonment on the north, and the causeway across it, Tank Bund Road, carries the twentieth-century public sculpture of the Telangana polity. Built in 1563 by Hussain Shah Wali for Ibrahim Quli Qutb Shah, the lake was the city's water supply for three centuries and remains its central civic landmark.