After long wait for capital, new promise for a future
AMARAVATI: Every day for the past 800 days, Gottipati Lakshmi, 40, has done the same thing. Leave home a little before 9am, and walk close to a kilometer to a tarpaulin tent in the heart of Thullur town. She dons a green stole, and with 200 fellow farmers, both men and women, starts chanting.
Jai Amravati, they chant till late in the evening, only to reassemble the next day. For most of those 800 days, the slogan was one of longing, of despair. Now, there is hope.
Lakshmi is one of close to 28,000 farmers from 24 villages who together gave away more than 34,000 acres of land to the state government in 2015 for the creation of Andhra Pradesh’s new capital, Amaravati. Lakshmi surrendered five acres, and dreamt that the new greenfield capital would turn her life around.
Then, in April 2019, the state government changed.
Amaravati was a project of chief minister Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party that lost the election.
The new man at the helm, his arch nemesis Jagan Mohan Reddy from the YSR Congress Party, wasn’t quite on the same page, dropped the Amaravati project, and proposed a plan to have three capitals instead — an executive capital at Vishakhapatnam, a judicial capital at Kurnool, and only the legislative capital in Amravati.
This set off a massive battle, both on the streets, and in the courts. In December 2021, Lakshmi was one of the hundreds of farmers who walked for over 400km to reach Tirupati to mobilise public support for their agitation, asking that Amaravati to be retained as the sole state capital.
On March 3, the Andhra Pradesh high court junked the three-capital plan, and upheld Amravati as the only capital in the state.
What this may mean, a challenge in the Supreme Court notwithstanding, is a revival of a slew of proposed projects which were allotted land by the TDP government, such as central government institutions, the National Institute of Design (50 acres), National Institute of Fashion Technology (10 acres), National Biodiversity Museum (25 acres), Central Public Works Department (28 acres), Reserve Bank of India (11 acres), and Comptroller and Auditor General of India (17 acres).
For farmers like Lakshmi, there is not only now a promise of a future that had once gone bleak, but a sense of justice.
Why it was chosen capital
Months after the bifurcation of AP in June 2014, the TDP government headed by Naidu identified a fertile agricultural zone between Vijayawada and Guntur as the capital city and named it Amaravati, after an ancient city of the Sathavahana dynasty on the banks of Krishna River.
The selection of Amaravati was against the advice of an experts’ committee which opposed building of a super city on the lines of Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana, and suggested a decentralised model. But Naidu had a different argument. He envisioned a capital, centrally located in the geography of the now redrawn AP, spread across 7,000 sqkm, larger than even Brihan Mumbai.
“When the TDP government proposed to acquire our fertile land, many of us were not willing to give up what was our only source of livelihood,” recalled Puvvada Surendra Babu, a farmers’ leader in Thullur.
But the government pressed on, and the farmers bought into the idea of a state capital, replete with towers blocks, commercial complexes, big business houses with huge employment potential, educational institutions, hospitals, banks and entertainment avenues. “We were convinced that construction of capital would definitely turn around our lives. So, we agreed to part with our lands and signed an agreement with AP Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA), created through a legislation for development of Amaravati as the capital city,” Babu said. The government acquired 34,385 acres from 28,526 farmers, under a land pooling system in 2015. As per the agreement, the farmers were allotted between 250 to 400 sq yards of commercial land, and 1,000 sq yards of residential land for every acre they surrendered to the authority.
Additionally, each farmer who surrendered their lands to the capital would get an annuity payment of ₹30,000 to ₹50,000 per acre, depending on whether the land was dry or wet, for 10 years, with a 10% rise every year. It was an innovative plan — and meant the farmers were effectively shareholders in the new city. On October 22, 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for Amaravati, and immediately after, the Naidu government moved its seat of power from Hyderabad to Amaravat. In the three years that followed, among the structures that were built were an interim government complex, a temporary High Court building, a legislature complex, even bungalows and apartments for lawmakers, judges, and officers. The TDP government spent around ₹8,572 crore on Amaravati in three years, including ₹5,674 crore on infrastructure, according to the figures available with the APCRDA.
All that changed in 2019 when the YSR Congress stormed to power. Within hours of assuming charge as CM, Jagan halted the Amaravati project.The Reddy cabinet also decided to wind up the agreement with the Singapore consortium. Reddy accused Naidu of turning Amaravati into a real estate venture, and said the former CM indulged in a form of insider trading, leaking information about the location to those close to him. He also argued that focusing development on one single mega capital would be an injustice to other regions of the state. In January 2020, the government introduced two separate bills – the Andhra Pradesh Decentralisation and Inclusive Development of All Regions Bill, 2020, seeking to establish three capital cities, and the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority (Repeal) Bill, 2020, aimed at doing away with the authority created to develop Amaravati as the capital.
Both bills were passed by the legislative assembly, but stalled by the TDP in the legislative council, where it had a majority.
Legal challenges
More than a hundred petitions, including some by joint action committees by farmers, were filed before the high court. A division bench took up the hearing in August 2020 and ordered status quo. In November 2021, another bench took up the hearing even as the Jagan Reddy government suddenly announced the withdrawal of the two laws on the three capitals and abolition of the APCRDA. Reddy announced he would reintroduce a foolproof and improved bill on the three capitals issue.
But even before a new legislation could be presented, the bench upheld Amaravati as the only capital of Andhra Pradesh on March 3. It also declared the state cannot take up any legislation to shift or trifurcate the capital. The judgment, though not unexpected, has put the state government into a tight spot. It will definitely move the Supreme Court, but intends to take time to do so, an official from chief minister’s office (CMO) said on condition of anonymity.