Hyderabad: People who know about the situation said that the Supreme Court postponed the hearing on the Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy government’s special leave petition for a month to decide between the three capitals for the state. This means the deadlock over Andhra Pradesh’s capital city has not been broken.
The state government asked the Supreme Court to speed up the hearing and settle the capital issue, but Justice K M Joseph and Justice B V Nagaratna said they wouldn’t do that.
Senior counsel for the state government, S. Niranjan Reddy, asked the bench in a special way for the hearing to start and end as soon as possible.
The Supreme Court bench, on the other hand, said it couldn’t hear the case until March 28 because there were so many different petitions in the case.
The SLP was supposed to be heard on February 23, but the bench was already busy with other cases.
The Amaravati farmers’ lawyers told the judge they needed more time to file a counterclaim.
Last year, on March 3, the state high court ruled that Amaravati was the only capital of Andhra Pradesh and that the state legislature didn’t have the power to make laws for three capitals. It also told the state government to finish building up Amaravati’s infrastructure within six months.
On September 3, the Jagan government went to the Supreme Court to fight against the high court orders. On November 28, 2022, the petitions were heard for the first time, and the apex court put a hold on the high court’s order to build infrastructure in Amaravati within a certain amount of time.
The Jagan government, on the other hand, has said that Visakhapatnam will be the state capital.
Last week, at an investors’ meeting in Bengaluru, state finance minister Buggana Rajendranath Reddy said that the idea that the state has “three capitals” was wrong and that Visakhapatnam will be the real capital.
He said that Visakhapatnam was the capital because it already had ports, industries, an ideal climate, a diverse culture, and room to grow with little investment.
Earlier, Andhra Pradesh’s chief minister, Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, said at a meeting in Delhi that Visakhapatnam would soon become the state’s capital and that he, too, would soon move his office there.
