Dr. Duggaraju Srinivasa Rao
Come June it will be 11 years since the parliament passed the Andhra Pradesh reorganization Act came into force with the collectively developed capital city, Hyderabad going to Telangana and residual Andhra Pradesh was forced to start from the scratch of building a new capital city with a mere 2000 crore assistance from the Centre. First five years under the Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, the capital Amaravati was conceived and projected as the futuristic city of India. But it remained as ‘city of graphic publicity’ with less of actual ground work. That was followed by the next five years under Jaganmohan Reddy, an inexperienced and vindictive CM, the capital Amaravati was kept frozen with not a single brick being added but allowed the buildings, already under construction to rust. The voters of Andhra Pradesh realized their mistake of 2019 verdict and threw out Jagan and brought back Chandrababu Naidu to steer the capital city. Now it is Dream Again Amaravati under progress. PM Narendra Modi, who originally laid the foundation for Amaravati capital city decade ago is coming once again to grace the restart of development work with the hope completing it by 2027.
What is giving hope for Chandrababu Naidu’s dream city is the changed political equations at Delhi where the Narendra Modi government is surviving on the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) support and Naidu and Modi’s now found comradeship. Modi has assured the financial support for Amaravati and Chandrababu Naidu focused on the capital construction. It is in his own political interest that he should stick to the realistic possibility in the construction of buildings as those 20,000 odd farmers, who voluntarily gave their 30,000 acres in land pooling scheme, as they believed in the capability of Chandrababu Naidu as he had the proven track record as the builder of modern Hyderabad city, are worried about the promised returns on their lands because of huge delay.
Amaravati is assured of 15,000 crores facilitated by Modi government via multilateral funding through World Bank and another 11,000 crores from HUDCO. Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Germany’s state owned bank KfW reportedly agreed to extend loans to build Andhra Pradesh’s Green Field capital. Union government under the leadership of Modi is overtly liberal in sanctioning whatever CM Chandrababu Naidu requests. Thus the ministry of railways has sanctioned a new track to Amaravati, connecting it to the Delhi-Chennai train track, thus getting the much needed connectivity to Hyderabad. The ministry of highways promised to build a outer ring road (ORR) at a cost of over 16,000 crores. It also promised a green field high way connecting Amaravati to Bangalore. The land acquisition for all these projects is under way. Contracts worth 37,000 crores already given for building infrastructure while work worth 27,000 crores is in the pipeline. Overall CM Naidu has raised near one lakh crores for the state capital project to be on track.
The 2018 designs for the development of 217 sq.Kms planned area by the Singapore government company is now roped again. The designs given by famous architect Norman Foster are dusted and the liveability smart concepts are lined up with 50% green cover, cycling tracks, EV charging stations, environmentally friendly buildings, underground power cables, parks, a river front and a road network with advanced traffic management systems. Technology driven and brand building Chandrababau Naidu is trying to retain his image of farsighted CM and doing all his best to generated promised 2 million jobs and create an ecosystem to attract and build global brands.
After using IT revolution to change the face of Hyderabad, Chandrababu Naidu in new Avatar of CEO of AP is talking of making Amaravati as Artificial Intelligence (AI) capital. He had a task force in place under the leadership of N. Chandrasekharan, Chairman of TATA group for innovation and economic development. With political and financial support from the Centre and TDP being part of NDA it is advantage Andhra Pradesh and its capital city Amaravati.
(Author is retired professor. The views expressed are personal opinion of the author. He can be reached at duggarajusrinivasarao@gmail.com)
