National parks of Telangana

Known forThe Chiran Palace grounds at Jubilee Hills — a national park inside Hyderabad.

A national park inside a city of ten million, which is the oddity worth understanding rather than memorising. It is the grounds of the Chiran Palace at Jubilee Hills, kept as forest because it was private and then notified because it had survived — the rocky scrub and the granite sheets here are what the whole Hyderabad plateau looked like before it was built on.

SettingDeccan thorn scrub · Granite outcrop · Urban remnant forest

For the examAll three of Telangana’s national parks are in or beside Hyderabad, which is the point of the question: the state has no large national park at all, only sanctuaries and two tiger reserves.

Known forThe old Nizam’s deer preserve at Vanasthalipuram.

Vanasthalipuram, on the Hyderabad–Vijayawada road, was a hunting preserve of the Nizams and is now the deer park its name says — harina is deer. Like the other two it survives because it had an owner before it had a status, and it is the least altered piece of scrub left on the city’s south-eastern side.

SettingDeccan thorn scrub · Blackbuck and chinkara habitat · Urban fringe

Known forDry scrub at Chilkur, on Hyderabad’s western edge.

A block of dry scrub at Chilkur on Hyderabad’s western edge, notified in 1994 when the city’s growth made it obvious that anything not protected would be built on within a decade. It is small, and its function is to hold a working sample of Deccan thorn scrub close enough to the city that it can be studied and taught.

SettingDeccan thorn scrub · Granite plateau · Peri-urban forest