Andhra Pradesh: The dangers in Vijayawada being the state capital

N Chandrababu Naidu

Vijayawada will be the new capital of Andhra Pradesh. Chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu has conveniently ignored the Centre-appointed Sivaramakrishnan committee report while naming the city on the banks of the Krishna river in his haste to get things moving in his state. The report gives three options for a capital city which are well worth considering.

Mr Naidu has, however, agreed to the committee’s suggestion to decentralise power. His political opponents have raised the fact that Mr Naidu chose Vijayawada as it has a powerful Kamma presence — a community that has traditionally backed the Telugu Desam Party (TDP). That notwithstanding, Mr Naidu’s choice also seems to have miffed the people of the Rayalaseema region, with reports that even ministers from the region were unhappy with the choice. It is now up to the CM to ensure that the people of Rayalaseema do not feel alienated and that the new capital will also help in culturally unifying the whole state.

One of the major criticisms against choosing Vijayawada was the lack of government land. Right from the time of the bifurcation, following speculation, the Vijayawada-Guntur corridor saw a real estate boom and now the government will have to buy land at a premium. The Sivaramakrishnan committee report suggests that only a quarter of the estimated `4.5 lakh crore required for the new state capital will come from the Centre.

The state will have to raise the remaining amount and in such a scenario purchasing private land at exorbitant prices will put pressure on the state exchequer. Another area of concern, which was also raised in the report, was that large areas of fertile agricultural land in and around the Vijayawada-Guntur delta region will have to be acquired. This will impact the food security of the state and will likely displace a large number of farmers. This is cause for concern in a state where about 52% of the total workforce is employed in agriculture and related services. The environmental impact real estate expansion will have on the Krishna river and its adjoining area cannot be ignored. This gains significance in view of reports that the CM is keen to have key government offices near Amaravati, a historical town situated on the river bank.

Mr Naidu, like his Telangana counterpart K Chandrashekar Rao, has a golden opportunity to build a model state and not just a capital. In his previous tenure as CM of undivided Andhra Pradesh Mr Naidu focused extensively on building urban assets — he was instrumental in transforming Hyderabad into an IT hub in the country — but was criticised for ignoring development in the rural areas. He must not repeat this mistake with Vijayawada.

Naidu doesn't think that Modi will hamper TDP's chance this time

The return of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader Chandrababu Naidu to the BJP-led NDA alliance, a decade after partying ways, does not come as a surprise. Recent opinion polls have suggested that if the TDP were to return to the NDA it would boost the chances of the alliance both in Telangana and Seemandhra. The confidence exuberated by leaders of both the BJP and the TDP on Sunday, when the tie-up was announced, reflected this. However, many would say that this deal will not be a game changer in the two would-be states. The BJP will be contesting 13 Lok Sabha seats and 62 assembly seats from undivided Andhra Pradesh, though the final plan is yet to be chalked out.
Mr Naidu is no longer the ‘hi-tech’, reformer chief minister he once was. The 1999 Time ‘South Asian of the Year’, who had the United States president and the British PM as guests to witness the IT revolution in Hyderabad, has been out of power for a decade and a lot has changed during this time. The Congress, which routed the TDP in 2004, may be a pale shadow of what it was, but other parties have moved into that political space. The K Chandrashekar Rao-led TRS and the Jaganmohan Reddy-led YSR Congress have gained where the two national parties and the TDP have lost. The alliance has also seen discontent within the TDP and in the state BJP unit — TDP members staged a protest outside Mr Naidu’s house and the BJP’s Telangana and Seemandhra unit chiefs were not present during the Sunday announcement. Mr Naidu, in an interview in November 2004, might have blamed the TDP’s poll debacle in the state on its alliance with the BJP — he even attributed the communal riots in Gujarat to have negatively impacted the TDP’s chances — but today political necessities have forced him to sing a different tune.
The TDP-BJP alliance is symbiotic in many ways: It gives the BJP an important ally in the southern state and the TDP a presence at the Centre, if an NDA government comes to power.

Telangana: Congress disagrees with Kiran Kumar Reddy's script for Andhra Pradesh

N Kiran Kumar Reddy

‘The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing’ — this phrase best  describes the present crisis the Congress is facing in Andhra Pradesh. The Congress-led UPA at the Centre wants the creation of India’s 29th state Telangana, by bifurcating Andhra Pradesh, but the leaders in Hyderabad are literally in two minds. While chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy is opposing the move, his deputy, Damodar Raja Narasimha, is for a separate Telangana state. In a move that highlights this divide and which puts a question mark over the Centre’s plan to introduce a Bill for a separate Telangana in Parliament, Reddy on Saturday issued a notice to Speaker Nadendla Manohar seeking a motion for returning the draft Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill to the Centre. Mr Reddy rejected the Bill stating that it did not give a ‘reason/basis’ for the bifurcation of the state. On Monday, the divide came out in the open with repeated adjournments of the assembly and with Mr Narasimha even demanding Mr Reddy’s resignation.
At the heart of the debate are the sentiments of the people on the Telangana and Seemandhra sides — both sides feel that they have been given short shrift. While one side of the divide blames the government for delaying the creation of the Telangana state, the other side criticises the ‘unjust’ division of the state and its resources. The state government, and the Centre, should have seen this coming. They should have taken the people from both sides of the divide into confidence, listened to their grievances and arrived at a formula that was acceptable to all parties. It was not for want of time that the party finds itself in the present mess — the call for a separate Telangana has been on for decades and it has been more than three years since Justice BN Srikrishna handed over his committee’s recommendations on the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh.
No matter how things pan out in Andhra Pradesh, one thing is clear: the Congress has failed to read the mood of the people. It has for far too long been unclear on its commitment to the creation of Telangana. This suggests bad political management and will have an impact not only the on the state elections but also on the Lok Sabha elections, both to be held in a  few months. If opinion polls are anything to go by, the Congress, which had won 33 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats from the state in 2009, will find it very hard to even get half of that tally. For a Congress that has been on the backfoot after the drubbing it received at the recent assembly elections held in four states, this is not good news.