Sai Reddy’s Amaravati Idea: A Slow-Cooked Slum Strategy

Vijayasai Reddy seems to share the vision of his former leader, Jagan Mohan Reddy as far as Amaravati is concerned. A message he posted on X this morning makes us to think so.

Sai Reddy says, “Bengaluru was founded in 1537 by Kempe Gowda, Hyderabad in 1591 by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, and Chennai in 1639 by the British East India Company under Francis Day. It took 500, 430, and 380 years respectively for them to become the metropolitan cities they are today. Amaravati cannot be manufactured overnight with borrowed money and grand illusions, especially when it is not self-financing as claimed.”

He further says, “Build the basics first, Assembly, Secretariat, High Court, and essential housing for government employees and stop there. Let Amaravati grow organically with people, business, and time. A capital city must rise from strength, not debt. Indiscriminate spending on fancy designs and oversized infrastructure is not vision; it is financial recklessness. Every unwarranted rupee spent today becomes a burden on the people of Andhra Pradesh tomorrow. Loans for non-revenue-generating projects do not build prosperity, they strain public finances”.

This is pretty much what Jagan Mohan Reddy says but Sai Reddy stopped just before supporting MA-VI-GUN.

Keeping aside the political rhetoric, let us look into the argument – ‘let Amaravati rise grow organically with people, business, and time’.

Unplanned Cities are nothing but unlivable cities with endless traffic, pothole roads, waterlogging every monsoon, and zero reliable public transport.

Almost every city in the country is unplanned and now, those living there are suffering there.

What happens next?

We have seen investors lament about the traffic snarls in Bengaluru and vent their frustration on Social Media. There are companies that shift out of Bengaluru just because of the Traffic.

And then, we have Hyderabad where the Government and GHMC is scratching their heads and are coming up with numerous flyovers and underpasses only to understand that nothing is enough and nothing will help the cause.

There is Delhi which gives holidays to schools during Winters because of Pollution and implement desperate ideas like Odd-Even Cars System.

So, people like Vijayasai Reddy wants Andhra Pradesh to get inspired by such cities.

If the basics are constructed in Amaravati and it is left on its own, we are only building another unlivable city. This is one of the rarest opportunities for AP as well as the countries to have a planned city like those in the West and we have to prove everyone wrong.

There are days where people agitated against the use of computers. Some of the leaders now in YSR Congress have their seniors in Congress who criticized Chandrababu Naidu’s HITEC City. They used to say “కంప్యూటర్లు తిండి పెడతాయా?”

Chandrababu Naidu has to prove the naysayers wrong once again!