Amaravati-Next milestone in India's Urbanisation

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s laying of foundation stone of Amaravati, a new chapter has begun in India’s quest for developing smart and world-class cities.

The yet to be born city will reside on the banks of river Krishna and is set to demonstrate a state government’s ability in executing large-scale eco-friendly infrastructure projects involving multiple stakeholders from the national and international arena.

Amaravati is not only the fifth planned capital city in Independent India, next to Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Gandhi Nagar and Naya Raipur, but it is also the country’s first green-field smart city.

Area wise, Andhra Pradesh Capital Region (APCR), in which Amaravati lies at the core, with a spread of 8352 sq. km. is the second largest administrative region in the country next only to the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT-Delhi) that is spread across 51109 sq. km. in three states and one union territory.

On the resources front, the project adopts the Public-Private-People partnership model which is nothing but a logical extension of the ubiquitous PPP model. Collecting around 33000 acres of land under the pooling method is itself an achievement for the government.

By leveraging its geographical proximity and cultural links with Singapore and Japan respectively, the state government signed memorandums with both of them to attract cheap financial resources and best of technologies.

Further, nine specialised cities - knowledge city, financial city, health city, tourism city, government city, sports city, electronics city, justice city and education city- of Amaravati is a microcosm of our future economy.

Last but not least, envisioning such a futuristic capital city is necessary for the new-born state to economically sustain amidst highly competitive neighboring states in which the capital cities-Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai-are the engines of domestic economies.

However, on the flip side, mobilization of resources at low-cost is a mammoth task for the state as it is already borrowing around 1000 crore rupees per month from the market to meet the day-to-day expenses.

The success of Amaravati is not only relevant for Andhra Pradesh but to India as a whole as the Union Government embarked upon large-scale urbanization process with an investment of one lakh crore rupees under the Smart City and AMRUT initiatives.

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