Minister for Revenue, Dharmana Prasada Rao, on Monday reiterated that chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy would soon shift his base to Visakhapatnam. Along with him, all the officers and the secretariat would be shifted, he asserted.
Speaking at a round table meeting in Srikakulam, the Minister made an appeal to the people of Uttarandhra to fight to achieve administrative capital in Visakhapatnam. He said Visakhapatnam has all the required infrastructure to be the capital of the state.
A small investment between Rs 5,000 crore and Rs 10,000 crore would make the city fit to be the capital of the State. On the contrary, Amaravati would require Rs 5 lakh crore as admitted by then chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu, he said.
The Minister said that the opportunity had come for the people of Uttarandhra to get the capital located in their region. He wanted the people to be vigilant and ensure that the capital is moved to Visakhapatnam. He also wanted the people to be cautious of some real estate people fighting against decentralization and want Amaravati to be the only capital.
He said that the Sivaramakrishnan Committee had advised the AP government to decentralise the offices and not to locate everything in one place. The committee had also advised against having the capital between Vijayawada and Guntur where fertile agricultural lands are available.
Several intellectuals have also advised the successor state of Andhra Pradesh to have decentralised development and not to locate every office in one place, a mistake that was done in the case of Hyderabad, the minister said.
Even after eight years of bifurcation, the institutions listed in Schedule IX and X were not distributed between the two states, he said. He felt that such mistakes should not be repeated and hence Jagan Mohan Reddy had proposed decentralisation. He expressed confidence that the chief minister would soon start functioning from Visakhapatnam, while steps were taken to make Kurnool as judicial capital, while retaining Amaravati as the legislative capital.
