The Centre is putting a heavy burden on the state government while claiming to provide full support for the construction of the capital city of Amaravati. On the one hand, it is arranging loans instead of grants. On the other hand, it is not providing full funding even for the approved schemes.
The central government has in principle agreed to acquire land for the Amaravati Outer Ring Road (ORR) with a width of 140 meters instead of the initially planned 70 meters. However, it has asked the state government to bare some of the cost of land acquisition, so the burden of about Rs. 1000 crore will fall on the state government.
The Union Ministry of Transport and National Highways (MoHR) Alignment Approval Committee approved the construction of the Amaravati ORR with a width of 70 meters and a length of 189.4 kilometers with 6 lanes on December 20 last year. If the population increases in Amaravati in the future, the ORR will have to be expanded.
Keeping this in mind, the AP government wrote a letter to the Center on March 1st to acquire land with a width of 150 meters. Apart from this, on March 5th, CM Chandrababu Naidu also met Union Minister Nitin Gadkari in Delhi and discussed this. With this, the Central Government agreed to acquire land with a width of 140 meters.
The Central Government has asked to bear some of the cost of acquiring land by adding another 70 meters to the width of 140 meters, as initially approved by the Alignment Approval Committee. With this, CM Chandrababu agreed to spend a Rs 1,000 crore. With this decision, land will be acquired for the Amaravati ORR with a width of 140 meters.
It is known that the Vijayawada Eastern Bypass proposal has already been shelved in the context of the construction of Amaravati ORR. When the Amaravati ORR project alignment was first approved, it was initially estimated that the total cost would be Rs 16,310 crore. Of this, Rs 2,665 crore was expected to be spent on acquiring 1,702 hectares.
However, if the Amaravati ORR is constructed with a width of 140 meters, about 3,400 hectares would be required. Similarly, the cost would also increase to Rs 5,200 crore. Of this, Rs 1000 crore would have to be borne by the state government.
