HYDERABAD: Heavy rains in Hyderabad city this week have left the entire outfield of the historic Niaz Stadium inundated since Monday morning and could cause severe damage to the main ground and the building if urgent remedial measures are not taken to salvage the situation.

The stadium comes under the authority of the municipal committee Qasimabad which is an under-resourced body and has remained quite reluctant to take care of the ground. Large parts of Qasimabad falling in the municipality’s jurisdiction have remained under rainwater since Monday and on Thursday Rangers personnel had to start relief work in some areas.

The municipality neither had resources nor had expertise to deal with such emergencies. A PCB regional U-19 academy programme had been in progress at the stadium since June 24. It is scheduled to end on Aug 10 but the accumulation of rainwater has caused major problems and the academy programme has now been shifted to Karachi.

Around 20 cricketers were attending it where they were being coached by Tahir Mehmood and former international cricketer from Hyderabad, Faisal Athar. Initially, the academy staff confronted problems like preparation of pitches and availability. Nets were somehow arranged later on as municipality was not in a position to ensure these facilities timely.

According to a piece of information shared by a cricket-related source, the only net was provided to ground by Sharjeel Khan, who used to have nets at the stadium until recently, with ground in-charge’s permission. He provided it to stadium in-charge Hafeezur Rehman — who had retired from municipality and had been given a sixmonth extension thus putting an ad-hoc arrangement in place.

“We had provided staff to help prepare pitches,” said president Regional Cricket Association (RCA) Hyderabad Mir Suleman Talpur. He said that arrangements were not made to drain out rainwater from the ground and added that cricketers have now reached Karachi.

The municipality chairman Kashif Shoro claimed that machines were installed to ensure dewatering from outfield otherwise standing water would not have been disposed of. He said that once normality returned to the stadium more steps would be taken to improve conditions of the ground badly hit by rains.

A similar situation was witnessed during the mid 1990s when the outfield was completely destroyed in torrential monsoon rains that visited Hyderabad in the first week of August. At that time, a concert of late music icon Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was planned at the Niaz Stadium and that had to be postponed. Rainwater accumulated in the surrounding areas of the ground was drained out in the stadium and stagnant rainwater destroyed the outfield which had to be prepared from scratch.

Only a year ago, the stadium was taken over by Qasimabad municipality after revoking its memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the PCB. The PCB then shifted several first-class matches from the stadium also. After municipality revoked its agreement Shoro had realised that it is the PCB that could run stadium better than the municipal committee. He said the PCB should only honour its commitment made in MoU — signed in July 2007 — for upgrading the stadium.

The PCB didn’t fulfil its promises of upgrading and developing stadium at par with other international stadiums. It only maintained conditions out of the outfield to make them playable for first-class matches. But measures like installation of flood lights, building of enclosures, pavilion etc continued to elude the Niaz Stadium till MoU was revoked.

Published in Dawn, August 2nd, 2019