From Pause to Promise: Amaravati’s Revival Begins

On May 2, 2025, under the white sun of the pre-monsoon afternoon, Amaravati stirred. The Prime Minister was about to arrive to lay the foundation stone for the city—once again. It was a familiar spectacle, except this time the foundations were not just for cement but for something more precarious: belief.

Once imagined as a greenfield dream carved out of the Godavari-Krishna delta, Amaravati had all the markings of aspiration: a capital city with riverfront boulevards, a Secretariat designed by starchitects, and rows of planned plots bearing the names of farmers who gave up their land for the promise of proximity to power. That was 2015. Then came the political shifts.

What followed was not a collapse, but a kind of suspended animation. Blueprints yellowed. The buildings stood half-built, its scaffolding a silhouette against fields that had begun to reclaim their own. With the three-capital plan floated by Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, Amaravati was demoted from centrepiece to pawn. Courts stalled it. Protests defined it. And the city—still mostly imaginary—became a metaphor for something larger: the fragility of statecraft in a federal democracy.

But Amaravati, like many Indian dreams, did not die. It lingered—in litigation, in spreadsheets, in the reluctant hope of those who had moved here from Mangalagiri and Tadikonda to open tea stalls, real estate agencies, and photocopy shops that faced empty plots. When the elections neared and the wind changed, so did the headlines.

Now, Amaravati is back. Or at least, it is being brought back. ₹58,000 crore in projects have been flagged off in Andhra Pradesh, ₹49,000 crore of that for the capital region alone. The Legislative Assembly will rise, the High Court will finally be roofed, and homes for judges, bureaucrats, and secretariat staff will line roads still named in expectation. The Centre has released over ₹4,200 crore under its bifurcation commitments—money that had been promised when the map was split, and Telangana and Andhra Pradesh parted ways in 2014.

“I see Amaravati not just as a city but a fulfilled dream.” PM Modi declared, adding, “Amaravati is going to be a city where dreams of the youths will get fulfilled. Amaravati will emerge as a leading city in sectors such as information technology, artificial intelligence, green energy, clean industry, education, and healthcare.” Plans were unveiled for a 320km transport network featuring underground utilities and advanced flood management systems. Additionally, the land pooling scheme infrastructure projects will cover 1,281 km of roads across Amaravati.

Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu called the Centre’s support “unforgettable”. It was his vision once, and now again. For Naidu, Amaravati is not just geography but unfinished narrative. A chance to complete what was halted—not in concrete but in continuity. “Job-creating, wealth-driving, people’s capital,” he declared from the stage, though what that means in practice depends less on vision and more on the slow, often unspectacular labour of building cities.

Because building is the easy part. Staying the course is harder. The ghost of the past decade still hovers. Farmers want guarantees, not fresh surveys. Builders want liquidity, not another set of renderings. And the people—the ones who traded ten acres for a tent office and a hope of rent—want something even harder to pin down: justice.

Amaravati is a revival, but also a reckoning. Its story is no longer about blueprints or elevation maps. It is about what happens when a city is paused by politics, and what it takes to believe again.

AmaravatiAndhra PradeshDevelopment projectsGodavari-Krishna deltaNarendra ModiNews BriefWeb Exclusive