Andhra Pradesh’s capital confusion

ANDHRA PRADESH: Andhra Pradesh’s nine-year quest for a capital took another twist last week when Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy said the state administration will work from Visakhapatnam. The announcement, made to potential investors in New Delhi, is likely to deliver another paroxysm to the agitation led by the farmers of Krishna and Guntur districts, who want the capital to be built in Amaravati, on the banks of river Krishna. The farmers do have a case.

In 2014, Reddy’s predecessor as CM, Chandrababu Naidu launched plans for a grand metropolis that would require a staggering one lakh acres of land in India’s most fertile farming region. To compensate farmers whose land would have to be acquired, he announced a sweet acquisition programme, christened the Land Pooling Scheme to make it appear voluntary. Each farmer would receive a sizable annual rent per acre for 10 years, and fully developed urbanised land up to 1,000 square yards per acre. For the landed people of Krishna-Guntur, Naidu’s vision was irresistible and they signed up in droves.

This set off a real estate gold rush as Andhra Pradesh’s surplus capital gushed into the Amaravati region and land values soared. As with all capitalist bubbles, what bloats shall burst, and the dream ended when Reddy’s party won the 2019 election and the new CM announced he had a more equitable plan, and that was to have three capitals, one in each region of the state: North, South Andhra, and Rayalaseema. The bureaucrats would work in Visakhapatnam, the law-makers in Amaravati and the judges in Kurnool.

Having signed away their land and seeing their dreams belied, Amaravati’s farmers launched an agitation and went to court, which has passed sympathetic, if unattainable, decrees: one was to build the capital in Amaravati only, and build it post haste. Governance having become a game of tag between ruling parties and the judiciary, Reddy rescinded his three capitals legislation, only to now announce Visakhapatnam as the seat of government.

AP’s capital confusion arises from a mixed-up notion of what the capital of a state should be. It is essentially a region where elected reps assemble to make laws aided by bureaucrats. A multi-storeyed public works building should suffice for the purpose. In medieval times, the capital was where the king sat—and sometimes he did so with tents in the desert. Most states in the US have their capitols in little towns; several country capitals are no more than boring bureaucrat towns. So how did the idea of a grand capital lodge itself in our minds?

In Amaravati’s case, its genesis lay in the imagination of Naidu, who as CM of a vastly reduced state, felt the need for a grand city to act as an investment magnet that generates taxes for the government and jobs for the youth. When it was bifurcated and lost its capital to Telangana in 2014, what AP was left with, was a vast agricultural landscape with hundreds of thousands of educated, but unemployed youth. Having witnessed Hyderabad’s transformation into an IT growth engine, Naidu knew foreign capital would be attracted only to a State with deep human talent pools and modern infrastructure. To him, Amaravati was more than a seat of power; it was to be an investment destination. Without it, AP would remain an agrarian state with no headroom for its people to grow — like another Kerala. So, when Reddy reports to work in the new capital of Visakhapatnam, the first item on his blotter will still be Amaravati.