Andhra Pradesh chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy on Tuesday said the state capital will be shifted to Visakhapatnam and he will have his office in the coastal city while inviting investors for Global Investment Summit (GIS) to be held there in March first week.
“Here I am to invite you to Visakhapatnam, which is going to be our capital in the days to come. I myself would also be shifting over to Visakhapatnam in the months to come,” he told the investors at the meeting.
This comes four months after the Supreme Court stayed the Andhra Pradesh high court order directing the state government to complete the works in Amaravati by March 2023.
In March last year, the Andhra Pradesh high court ruled against the plan to have three capitals and told the government to develop Amaravati as the state capital.
It was in 2015 when then state chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu declared Amaravati as the state capital and acquired 33,000 acres of land from farmers to build the new capital city. The new city, Naidu promised, was to be developed on the Singapore model.
Andhra Pradesh lost its capital Hyderabad to Telangana when the erstwhile state was divided into two in 2013-2014. Under the Andhra-Telangana Reorganization Act, the centre promised to provide adequate funds to Andhra Pradesh to develop a new capital.
Soon after coming to power in 2019, CM Jagan Reddy announced his intention to develop three capitals in the state– Amaravati as the legislative capital, Visakhapatnam as the administrative capital and Kurnool as the judicial capital.
In 2020, the Andhra Pradesh legislative assembly approved a law, Andhra Pradesh Decentralisation and Inclusive Development of All Regions Act, 2020, for creating three capitals.
The new law was opposed by farmers of Amaravati under the banner of Rajadhani Rythu Parirakshana Samiti saying their land was acquired by the state government on the promise that Amaravati will be developed as a full-fledged state capital.
They moved the Andhra Pradesh high court and the court, after several hearings, ordered the state government to complete all works in Amaravati by March 2023 towards building it as the state capital.
A three-judge bench of the high court comprising Chief Justice Prasanth Kumar Mishra and justices M Satyanarayana Murthy and DVSS Somayajulu in its verdict held that the state government had no “legislative competence” to change or remove Amaravati as the capital of the three civic wings – legislature, executive, and judiciary of the state.
The 307-page verdict was challenged by the Jagan Reddy government in September, saying that the “state does not have the power to decide on its capital is violative of the basic structure of the constitution.”
Several ministers in Andhra Pradesh have categorically been saying that the state government would come up with a new bill on the three capitals issue, the ongoing litigation in the Supreme Court notwithstanding. However, no official announcement was made about the bill.