Supreme Court ruling upsets CM’s plan to shift to Vizag in Sept 2023

New Delhi: AP realty sector’s dream of Vizag investments is all set to take a beating with the Supreme Court turning down the ‘urgent hearing plea’ of AP government on the ‘Capital’ issue and adjourning the case to December here on Tuesday while refusing to stay the AP High Court order putting hold on capital shift plans.

It also means that Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy will have to reside in Tadepalli for the time being and his packing and moving plans come unstuck.

Delivering a big blow to his dreams the newly-constituted Bench of the Supreme Court consisting Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Bela M Trivedi, on Tuesday tossed the next hearing to the year-end.

Former Attorney General K K Venugopal, on behalf of the State government, pleaded for a stay on the AP High Court order that asked the government to put on hold such plans. The Bench refused urgent hearing too in the matter. Hearing before December was not possible as several important cases would come up before the Constitution Bench between August and November.

This ruling comes as a dampener for not only Jagan but also the booming realty sector of the coastal city, banking on Jagan’s moves. There is little chance of the Supreme Court concluding the hearing in this one and the case might pan into the next calendar year too.

However, 2024 being the general election year, it blows the Capital case wide open. During the last Investors Summit, Jagan had declared that the State had received investment proposals worth Rs 13 lakh crore with an employment opportunity for six lakh people.

The Chief Minister reiterated that Visakhapatnam would become the executive capital of Andhra Pradesh in the days to come and he would be moving over to the port city.

In fact, his ‘September-shift plan’ was preceded by an ‘Ugadi-shift plan’ and much before that by a ‘Dasara’ plan and so on and so forth. His Cabinet colleagues like Botcha Satyanarayana and others too have been reiterating the same defending the necessity. The ‘Three Capitals’ protagonists have been arguing that it would lead to the development of all regions.

Jagan is already short of a major election issue - Polavaram completion. The Capital issue now seems to double his pain. Real bad news for him as this development comes as a double whammy after the high profile kidnap drama in Vizag that made his party MP say “Better I shift my realty business to Hyderabad.”