Vying for the top continues in Hyderabad

The B.R. Ambedkar statue to be inaugurated on his birth anniversary on the fringes of the Hussainsagar on Friday is going to be one of the taller buildings in the city at 125 feet. It is more than twice the height of the Buddha monolithic statue in the middle of the Hussainsagar, installed in 1992 after an ill-fated attempt. The Buddha statue is 58 feet tall.

But the Ambedkar statue will have to fight for attention as it is surrounded by the yet-to-be-inaugurated Telangana Martyrs’ Memorial, whose flame rises to a height of 161 feet and the New Telangana Secretariat where the Ashoka Emblem on the dome touches 278 feet.

The Secretariat might be a taller building than the Telangana State Police Control and Command Centre, whose height is a notch lower at 272 feet at the helipad. But the terrain of Deccan Plateau makes it visible from almost the entirety of the city as it is built on KBR Ridge giving it an edge at 589 metres above the sea level. Incidentally, all the new tall structures have been built after the formation of Telangana.

However, Hyderabad’s foundational monument, Charminar, still towers over the city with a height of 183 feet. But the race to the top is still ongoing with a 57-storey residential-cum-commercial complex near Kokapet set to reach a height of 748 feet.

But for travellers visiting the city, the one towering structure that can be seen while flights land in Shamshabad airport is Saint Ramanujacharya’s seated statue with the Tridandi reaching a height of 216 feet.