Capital Conflict
TDP chief Naidu turns Amaravati into a political battlefield
Opposition leader and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) president N. Chandrababu Naidu has hit the streets of proposed state capital Amaravati ahead of the assembly winter session, beginning on December 9. He plans to highlight the uncertain future of the greenfield metropolis.
On a day-long tour on November 28, Naidu warned that “Andhra Pradesh’s credibility is at stake” as the government scraps infrastructure deals and reviews power purchase agreements. Just a few months ago, the Amaravati region had been teeming with over 70,000 workers. Now the area is deserted. Naidu said that during his rule, contracts worth Rs 9,500 crore were billed and paid for while tenders for projects worth Rs 43,000 crore were issued in the first phase of the project.
For this, the state had also acquired 54,000 acres. “After the projects were completed, the state would still have had over 10,000 acres left, with the potential to generate more than Rs 1 lakh crore in revenues,” says Naidu. He appealed to the six-month-old Jaganmohan Reddy government to see the benefits of setting up the new city, instead of finding cause to shut it down. Naidu has blamed Chief Minister Reddy for the logjam, including the World Bank and the Singapore consortium’s retreat from the project, and demanded justice for the farmers who pooled land for the metropolis.
Meanwhile, there have been protests against Naidu too. A section of farmers are demanding that Naidu make a public apology as some of them were discriminated against in the land-pooling process. There is other criticism too. “He and his associates have financial stakes in Amaravati. Naidu tries to create the impression that a world-class city in the making has got stalled,” says Ravi Kommaraju, ex-professor of political science, Andhra University, “but there is a big credibility gap that he’ll find hard to fill.” Those in support of Amaravati have a different take. “Building a new city is an alien concept; not many understood it,” says political commentator C. Narasimha Rao. “Naidu had envisioned more than the shifting of the administrative capital; he wanted to build a worldclass city to compensate for the loss of Hyderabad.” Some analysts also blame Chief Minister Reddy for the mess, saying he has spent the first six months in power destroying almost everything his predecessor had done. They say he should focus on developing a revenue-rich city, as well as an industrial base, if he wants to implement his grand welfare measures. Especially as the state is strapped for cash. ■