Visakhapatnam will be Andhra Pradesh capital: Chief Minister Jagan Reddy

Mangalore Today News Network / NDTV

Visakhapatnam, Jan 31, 2023: Visakhapatnam will be Andhra Pradesh’s new capital, Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy announced today, thus sealing the fate of the specifically-developed capital Amaravati.

 

"Here I am, to invite you, to Visakhapatnam, which is going to be our capital in the days to come," he said, while announcing an investment summit to be held there on March 3 and 4. While he did not set out a timeline, he did add, "I myself will be shifting over to Visakhapatnam in the months to come."

This comes in the ninth year after Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh and got Hyderabad as its capital.

While operating out of Hyderabad in the interim, the Andhra government in 2015, then led by TDP’s N Chandrababu Naidu, declared that Amaravati, in the Vijayawada-Guntu region on the banks of the river Krishna, would come up as the new capital.

Then in 2020, the state planned to have three capital cities — Amaravati, Visakhapatnam and Kurnool. That plan was later withdrawn and Amaravati formally remained the capital.

But Amaravati has been the centre of an alleged land scam, for which Mr Reddy’s party YSRCP has accused the previous chief minister, Mr Naidu.

Mr Reddy’s party, demanding a probe by the CBI, has alleged that some people who were told in advance about the location of the new capital had bought land there to unduly benefit from an imminent boom. In a representation to the Centre, the state government said over 4,000 acres were bought by such people in 2014.

But N Chandrababu Naidu, while denying any such wrongdoing, had questioned why land originally acquired from farmers to build a new capital was being sold off by the YSRCP government. Some months ago, the Leader of Opposition specifically found fault with the AP Capital Region Development Authority’s decision to lease out the residential towers, built for government employees, to private entities.