City of Illusions

On 20 January, YS Jaganmohan Reddy, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, introduced a bill in the legislative assembly to form three capitals for the state—an executive capital at Visakhapatnam, a legislative capital at Amaravati and a judicial capital at Kurnool. On 31 July, Biswabhushan Harichandran, the governor of Andhra Pradesh, assented to the plan. This put an end to the project of building a grand capital for Andhra Pradesh in Amaravati, which had been underway for six years after its bifurcation in 2014. Locals I spoke to, told me that the villages and communities of the fertile Krishna river bank, where the city was to come up, are now surrounded by half-built structures, their lives changed forever by a busted real-estate boom, and haunting reminders of a capital that will never be completed. I travelled to Amaravati multiple times between 2014 and 2019, and watched the rise and fall of a dream. On my last visit, in March 2019, the fate of the city already seemed to be sealed.

Amaravati was the brainchild of former chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who envisioned it to be a capital tailored for the IT era, such as the one he had helped develop in Hyderabad. During the 2014 elections to the Andhra Pradesh assembly, Naidu successfully pitched himself as the man of the hour—after all, he had ushered in Hyderabad’s IT revolution and nurtured what eventually became Cyberabad.

In August 2014, the Sivaramakrishnan Committee appointed by the union ministry of home affairs suggested that the residual state, instead of setting up a capital in the Vijayawada-Guntur region, distribute the various capital functions and offices across the state to create a decentralised model of development. The government, however, vetoed the plan in September, and announced it would be building a new city near Vijayawada. 

The capital was to take its name from Amaravati, an ancient Buddhist site that was home to the Satavahana kingdom. The messaging was strong. The new city would redeem the pride of the Andhras, who had been forced to relinquish their ownership of two thriving cities—Madras and then Hyderabad—that they had invested heavily in and helped prosper. It evoked the Telugu Desam Party’s founder and actor NT Rama Rao’s battle pitch for Telugu self-respect which had brought the party to power within nine months of its founding in 1983.

The capital would be spread over 30,000 acres, in 30 villages that lay between the highway that connects Vijayawada to Guntur and the Krishna river. It was a daunting task, considering the state’s revenues had fallen drastically after losing Hyderabad and the special status promised by the central government—which included major tax breaks—never came through. But Naidu was in a hurry given that Andhra Pradesh had been given permission to use Hyderabad as capital only for ten years. 

To build the capital in Amaravati, the cash-strapped state government opted for land pooling—where farmers part with their lands in exchange for better developed residential and commercial plots, and an annual compensation—instead of acquisition. It was an experiment that could have changed the land-acquisition model for future projects across India. Many farmers, especially those who were actively farming and did not lease out their lands to others, resisted parting with their fertile tracts. Landless workers wondered where they stood in the entire scheme of things. Many saw their entire lives uprooted, with agriculture grinding to a halt and the labour for the new construction boom coming from northern India. The landless labourers of the region, most of whom belong to the Dalit community, were forced to migrate in search of jobs.

Land owners and opportunists meanwhile made a quick buck from real estate speculation. In November 2014, travelling through the villages that were soon to be part of the Amaravati capital region, it was hard to miss the number of real estate consultants who had mushroomed overnight. Even grocery stores and vegetable vendors put up signboards announcing that they were now dealing in real estate. Lands that sold for between Rs 10 lakh and 80 lakh an acre, with the price varying with fertility and distance from the Krishna river, were now going for between Rs 1.2 and 1.5 crore. 

Men in spotless white clothes roamed the narrow village streets in fancy cars. So much money was changing hands and so quickly that an enterprising few began advertising rentals for currency-counting machines. Ministers and leaders of Naidu’s TDP toured villages and addressed public meetings trying to convince them to “sacrifice their lands for a greater public good”. It was a call largely accepted by rich Kamma land-holders who had long been the core support base of the TDP. 

The Reddys, another dominant caste in the region, had opposed the planned city. Reddy-dominant villages—which largely support Jagan’s Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party—opposed land pooling, leading to a patchwork of government land unfit for Naidu’s grandiose plans. Roads built in the fledgling city ended abruptly amid the fields of those who were unwilling to give in to government pressure to pool land. Many also opposed the planned capital because it would further sideline the drought-prone Rayalaseema region, where Reddys are dominant. Urban planners said it was foolish to build a city in the floodplains of the Krishna. Farmers and experts concurred that it did not make sense to build a city in some of the most fertile soils in the entire state. In 2014 and 2015, miscreants set fire to standing crops in some villages that were still resisting land pooling, raising tensions between the dominant castes in the region. 

The government continued to release artists’ impressions, grandiose plans and fantastic 3D renderings of buildings planned for Amaravati, but the painfully slow progress on the ground earned it the sobriquet of bhramaravati, or the city of illusions. In 2017, Naidu even invited SS Rajamouli, the director of the pseudo-historic thriller Baahubali who had dreamed up a glorious city for his blockbuster, to design some of the buildings in the Amaravati capital region. By January 2018, the government claimed to have completed 45 percent of the work at Amaravati. “We have completed 95 percent of land acquisition, readied master plans and the city plan, handed over 60,000 plots to 27,000 farmers,” Sreedhar Cherukuri, the commissioner of the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority, told the media.

But as the 2019 legislative assembly elections approached, the Amaravati of Naidu’s dreams seemed as fictional as Rajamouli’s set. The government needed an additional one lakh crore rupees, an impossible amount, to finish the project. With the YSRCP emerging as the favourite to win the elections, doubts began to be raised about the future of Amaravati. Many YSRCP leaders spoke in favour of shifting the capital to more accessible locations, while Naidu continued to tell voters that they needed to bring him back to power to realise the dream of Amaravati. 

While residents of the region were anxious to see progress, visitors who came often by bus to see their new capital take shape were greeted by a confusing mess of swanky roads cutting through empty fields, half-finished flyovers, mounds of dirt and slabs of bare concrete. Farmers who had contributed to land pooling were required to leave their fields fallow and survive on a pension given by the state government, but other kinds of trades began to flourish, thanks to the huge numbers of government employees that moved there from Hyderabad. The villages were largely deserted on weekends when most employees travelled back to Hyderabad to spend time with their families. By then the tide was already turning. In 2019, when Nara Lokesh, Naidu’s son and general secretary of the TDP, who had taken a personal interest in land acquisition and construction, lost the election from Mangalagiri, a constituency overlapping the capital region, it was a sign of things to come. 

Soon after the YSRCP came to power, in July 2019, the World Bank pulled its USD 300 million investment in Amaravati, citing the government’s non-compliance with policies and settlements with the affected parties. By November, the Singapore consortium, another investor, had pulled out of the project too. With the new chief minister, Jagan, freezing contracts citing irregularities, the heavy machinery had already fallen silent.

According to locals, construction workers and contractors, who had been working overtime mere months ago, have left the capital in a hurry, leaving only lonely security guards who keep watch over fresh buildings collecting dust. The towering flats that overlook fields have not been allotted and lie empty. The only noise since the election has been that of the occasional protests by TDP-backed farmers, angry at the move to shift the capital, but the new government seems in no mood to relent. With ministers and government officials all set to move base to Visakhapatnam, Amaravati has become a dystopian land without a future.