Vijayawada: Andhra Pradesh High Court Chief Justice Prashant Mishra has made it clear that Amaravati belongs to all the people of Andhra Pradesh and not just to the farmers who offered their lands to build it.
A division bench of chief justice and judges Satyanarayana Murthy and Justice Somayajulu continued their final hearing, for the second day on Tuesday, on a batch of petitions challenging the two acts on decentralisation and repeal of APCRDA.
The chief justice observed that 30,000 farmers offered their lands voluntarily to build the capital city, Amaravati. “It is the capital for all the people of the entire state and also for the people living in Amaravati, Visakhapatnam and Kurnool. Freedom fighters fought for freedom for all the people across the nation and not for themselves alone,” he stressed.
Petitioner’s counsel Shyam Divan argued that at the time of bifurcation of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh to form the new state of Telangana, it was mentioned in the AP Reorganisation Act, 2014, that the Centre should provide financial support to the residuary AP to develop a new capital city as it was losing the existing capital city Hyderabad.
Though such provision was not incorporated in any acts made at the time of setting up new states in the past, this was specially mentioned with regard to AP to help it develop its capital city, he said.
He submitted that as the Parliament fixed the capital city for AP by mentioning in the split act and even allotted Rs 2,500 crore to build the capital, the AP government was having no right to change it.
The spirit of the bifurcation act was to have the capital city fixed once and for all, and there was no chance for the government of the day to come up with another legislation on the same issue, he said.
The petitioner’s counsel argued that several committees estimated that the land value at the capital city would go up once it was developed and if each acre would fetch above Rs one crore, the state government was having no right to deprive the farmers of this benefit, making them lose Rs 33,000 crore in all.
