Amaravati 2.0 works begin

Vijayawada : Amaravati 2.0 works began at Uddandarayunipalem on Saturday, much to the joy of 29,000 farmers who had given 33,000 acres of land under land pooling for the construction of Capital city in 2017-18 when TDP was in power.

Relaunching the works of the capital city, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, announced that the port city of Visakhapatnam will be developed as financial capital while a High Court bench and industries will be set up at Kurnool. He said the World Bank and ADB had committed to fund Rs 13,600 crore for Amaravati phase-I development. The money will be released from January 2025.

Naidu said it was unfortunate that the previous government ignored the capital city and turned it into ruins. It took four months to clear the mess they had created before re-starting the works.

If the YSRCP government had not dumped the capital city construction activity, by now a lot of habitations, Universities and tax revenue contributions would have taken place and the population would have been around six lakhs, he said. Naidu said the problem was that they hated him and that made people of the state suffer. Some called it a graveyard; some said it gets submerged during floods and continues to spread all kinds of false propaganda with single-point agenda to destroy it. Most political leaders generally plan for short-term vision while he plans for at least the next 50 years and people heckle initially. But it is this long-term vision which has made Hyderabad a global city, he said.

Naidu said Amaravati is a self-financing project and does not require lakhs of crores as was claimed by the previous regime which had no vision at all. Their only vision was destruction.

He said Amaravati is like mine for employment generation. In addition to the existing institutions like VIT, SRM and Amruth Universities, many other institutions like Xavier School of Management will soon have their unit here and Law School will also come up.

He said the state government had urged the Centre to introduce bullet trains connecting Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai and Amaravati and the issue is under examination, the CM said.

The Government, which had re-started the works on the seven-floor Capital Region Development Authority building at a cost of Rs 160 crore would soon be completed with most modern facilities on par with international standards.

He especially thanked the women who continued a valiant fight against the previous government for over 1,600 days and protected Amaravati despite being subjected to lathicharge, threats and foisting of false cases against them.