Vijayawada: It’s a piquant situation within the Telugu Desam. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu wants to scale down land prices around Vijayawada city while quite contrarily, TD legislators are making plans to boost demand and hike prices.
Mr Naidu has openly expressed his displeasure about increasing land prices. The CRDA has, at his behest, imposed rules to curb a realty boom and cut land prices too. Telugu Desam legislators and MPs want the rules to be lifted to induce demand
and get prices hiked for owners. They were angered by the drop in land prices. According to reports, the ideology that Mr Naidu espouses differs from that of the TD legislators of Krishna district. Mr Naidu feels that land prices had already reached a high and nobody would come to set up industries in the vicinity of Vijayawada if they were raised further.
Each acre of land alre-ady cost nearly Rs 10 crore at some of the main locations around Vijayawada city while the land that was in huge demand at important roadside junctions in Krishna and Guntur districts.had reached Rs 20 crore.
These were being converted for realty and also construction purposes. The owners, glad that their land was fetching such high values, had been eager to sell to fund their children's education and marriages.
But this is now a thing of the past as not much sale is taking place now with the CRDA rules not allowing construction.
The CRDA, which is being run under the leadership of Mr Naidu, imp-osed these rules to protect the agriculture fields around the city for future generations. But legislators, including MPs Kesineni Srinivas (Nani), Konakalla Narayana, MLAs Gadde Rammohan, Vallabhaneni Vam-simohan, Bode Prasad and MLC Rajendra Prasad have spoken out in opposition to the Chief Minister’s wish to curb zooming land prices.
The legislators questioned how the CRDA could control their own land when landowners were sacrificing what they owned for various public utilities, including the capital city's construction. It remains to be seen who will uphold Mr Naidu's stand and who will not.
