Easy part over, Amaravati farmers may find the going tough as they enter north Andhra

The public mood is building in north Andhra against the foot march by Amaravati farmers which they launched on September 12 after the high court’s nod.  

YSRCP’s counter-moves

The 900-km foot march is intended to mold public opinion against the state government’s proposal to have three capital cities for Andhra Pradesh. They prefer Amaravati to remain as the only capital.

Rubbing salt into injury, Education Minister Botsa Satyanarayana, at a round table in Vizag on Sunday, 25 September, said if the government so desired it could disrupt the farmers’ march in just five minutes.

Making the matters worse, the YSRC is planning to organise a rival padayatra by people from the three districts in north Andhra against the objective of Amaravati farmers’ march.

The idea is to create awareness among the people that the YSRC government was trying to ensure equitable distribution of development by having three capital cities in three regions of the state.

Padayatra 2.0

It was on December 17, 2019, barely six months after YSRCP came to power, that Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy hinted in the Assembly that Andhra Pradesh may have three capitals and the government may look into that option for the overall, uniform development of the state.

A day after the announcement, farmers in 29 villages who had parted with their land for the proposed core capital of Amaravati launched an agitation which had completed 1,000 days recently.

In the last 1,000 days, the Jagan Mohan Reddy government could not, however, implement its three-capital plan due to varied reasons, including legal tangles.

In a severe blow to the Jagan government, a three-judge bench of the Andhra Pradesh High Court headed by Chief Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra on 3 March ordered that Amaravati be developed as the capital of the state as planned under the APCRDA Act brought by the previous TDP government.

What the high court said

The high court bench also observed that the Andhra Pradesh state legislature has no legislative competence to enact any law for shifting the three organs of the state out of Amaravati. The stay given by the high court earlier on shifting government offices from Amaravati to other parts of the state would also continue.

After the state government brought in a law scrapping the APCRDA Act and the AP Decentralisation and Inclusive Development of All Regions Act, farmers approached the high court.

The state government subsequently repealed the two controversial laws but said it would bring them in a new form.

The Amaravati farmers had last year taken out a rally from Amaravati to Tirumala temple from 1 November to 17 December. A grand closing ceremony was also held on the concluding day in Tirupati town in which TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu also participated.

The current padayatra will pass through several villages in the districts of Guntur, Bapatla, Krishna, Eluru, West Godavari, East Godavari, Ambedkar Konaseema, Kakinada, Anakapalli, Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram and Srikakulam.

Jagan govt approaches SC

Six months after the state high court struck down its three-capitals plan, the Jagan government on 17 September, approached the Supreme Court on the subject.

The government has filed a special leave petition (SLP) with the apex court challenging the high court’s order, which upheld Amaravati as the only capital of Andhra Pradesh.

The petition claimed the order undermined the government’s legislative competence to change the state’s capital.

“Our government’s stated commitment to the people is the decentralisation of governance, and the trifurcation of capitals is one of the milestones in pursuit of that commitment. The filing of the SLP by the state is another remedy in law being sought by the state to enable further progress in its resolve,” said a top official from the state government.

In the petition, the government said that if a state, re-organised in pursuance of central legislation under Articles 3 and 4 of the Constitution, was held to be without the power to reorganise its capital, it would be destructive to the federal structure of the Constitution.

Farmers offered plots

During the tenure of Chandrababu Naidu as the cheif minstier, farmers, under a land-pooling scheme, surrendered their land for which they were promised that, for every acre of land pooled, 800 to 1,000 sq yards of residential and 100 to 450 square yards of commercial land would given to them in the layouts developed by CRDA, with all amenities.

Now they fear that if the executive arm of the capital goes to Vizag, the value of their sites in Amaravati will drop drastically.