Hyderabad: The Andhra Pradesh government has claimed to have spent Rs 850 crore out of the Rs 1850 crore released by the Centre for the 'construction' of Amaravati.
However, nothing has actually been spent on construction or building expenditure of the capital city and all the expenditure has been towards payments to land owners under the land pooling scheme, payment for structures, one time payment for gardens, trees etc. one time agriculture loan waiver and also payments made to Surbana, the Singapore based company that prepared the master plan.
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The Centre had initially released Rs 1,500 crore, of which Rs 1,000 crore was for creation of infrastructure in the capital city and Rs 500 crore for construction of government buildings like Raj Bhavan, Assembly, High Court etc. It had later released another Rs 350 crore for construction.
Recently the Centre announced another Rs 200 crore though the funds are yet to be released. The AP government had estimated an expenditure of Rs 15,000 crore for completion of the first phase by 2018 and had asked the Centre for Rs 4,000 crore per year.
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Meanwhile, for the last two years the state government has not sent expenditure details of Rs 1,850 crore that the Centre had released. The central government is insisting on these details before releasing further funds.
A senior official in the AP finance department told this newspaper that they had sent the expense report to the Centre and the amount spent on paying farmers etc. had been categorised under “others”. He said these “others” were valid expenses under capital city expenditure.
