Once upon a time, Hyderabad was known as City of Lakes. Some of these lakes are natural and various are manmade bodies.^[1] As per various sources only a few decades back, Hyderabad had a large number of water bodies such as lakes, reservoirs, rivers, streams, aquaculture ponds, tanks etc. (as per some sources between 3000 and 7000 including natural and manmade bodies. Locally known as cheruvu, kunta, tanks ). Most of these lakes have totally disappeared and the surface area of most of the surviving lakes have shrunken and turned to tiny ponds and cesspool.^[2] Some of the lakes which have totally disappeared are Tigal Kunta, Somajiguda Tank, Mir Jumla tank, Pahar Tigal Kunta, Kunta Bhawani Das, Nawab Saheb Kunta, Afzalsagar, Nallakunta, Masab Tank etc.^[3] Hussainsagar Lake, Kunta Mallaiyapalli have shrunk drastically.^[4] Out of thousands of water bodies those were existing in 1970s in various sizes in and around Hyderabad, today only about 70 to 500 of them have survived.

Source : Wikipedia