Municipal Administration Minister Botsa Satyanarayana said ‘Amarvati is not fit to be state capital.’
Hyderabad: A statement by Andhra Pradesh Municipal Administration Minister Botsa Satyanarayana has created immense confusion. Earlier this week Satyanarayana said,“Amarvati is not fit to be the capital of the state”. This statement, followed by demands made by other legislators and leaders of the ruling YSR Congress to shift the capital to their respective Assembly constituencies, has further compounded the confusion.
As Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy is currently on a nine-day tour of the United States and is expected back in the country on Sunday, there is no one to clarify the fate of Amaravati. Meanwhile, the Bharatiya Janata Party, too, joined the Opposition camp consisting of TDP, Congress and other smaller parties, insisting that there shall not be any change in the status of Amaravati as the capital of Andhra Pradesh.
Satyanarayana made this statement on Tuesday in the wake of floods to river Krishna which inundated parts of Amaravati city limits, including the residence of former Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, who rented a house built on the banks of the river. The minister categorically said that Amaravati was not suitable to be the capital city as it had been planned on several low-lying areas and flood prone zones.
“We are reviewing on Amaravati being the capital city of Andhra as it is not suitable to go for massive construction of offices and commercial zones. Here the general cost of construction is almost double—it takes Rs 2 lakh whereas in the normal course it takes Rs 1 lakh. The city is planned in agricultural fields where three crops are grown per year,” Satyanarayana said.
The minister’s statement came in the backdrop of stalled construction activity in Amaravati city since Jagan became the Chief Minister on 30 May. A Cabinet sub-committee has been set up to examine irregularities in award of construction works of government buildings in the layout.
The Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) has suspended the construction work and has terminated services of close to 90 consultancies . It has also stopped payment of bills of contractors as well as annual royalties to farmers who had given their lands for the city. Close to 18,000 farmers had given around 33,000 acres of lands for the capital city under a land pooling scheme, designed by previous TDP government in 2015.
Obviously, the farmers who had given their lands for Amaravati are an agitated lot. A delegation of them met BJP’s Andhra unit president Kanna Lakshminarayana at Guntur on Friday and urged him to not change the status of the city. Lakshminarayana fully backed their concerns and made it clear that the BJP would fight for retaining Amaravati as Andhra Pradesh capital.
Lakshminarayana reminded that as the BJP government at the Centre had in the last five years spent around Rs 2,000 crore and approved Amaravati as the capital of Andhra Pradesh, Jagan had no right to review the same now on the pretext of its wrong geographical location. “BJP will stand by farmers who had sacrificed their fertile lands for the sake of the capital city,” BJP state unit president said.
Former Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu on Friday made a PowerPoint presentation and accused the Jagan government for creating “man made floods” in Amaravati to prove that it was a wrong choice for the capital city. Naidu contended that the Andhra Pradesh government had deliberately stored water at Prakasam Barrage near Amaravati so that all low-lying areas would be submerged.
However, a section of YSR Congress legislators from Vijayawada and Guntur contended that the Opposition was creating confusion. “Just because we said the area selected for the city was flood prone, it doesn’t mean that we will change the capital city,” YSR Congress MLA Malladi Vishnu said.