Table agreements in House: Raghavulu 

Vijayawada: The CPM politburo member, B V Raghavulu asked the State government to table all agreements related to the new capital city on the floor of Assembly and allow parties and people to debate on them. Speaking at a meeting on ‘Amaravati development – intervention of foreign companies’ here on Wednesday, Raghavulu took strong exception to the State government signing number of agreements with foreign countries on building the new capital city for the State.

• Takes strong exception to government signing number of agreements with foreign countries
• Dubs Swiss Challenge claims of government as false and misleading, and states that an agreement was signed with Singapore government

He said that the government had signed an agreement with the Singapore government on December 8, 2014 where the Singapore government had agreed to provide master developer for the capital city. “The present claims of the State government on appointing a master developer through Swiss Challenge procedure were totally false and misleading,” he said and added that the government had already agreed to give the work to Singapore as per the 2014 agreement.

Referring to the Swiss Challenge system, Raghavulu said that the Central Vigilance Commission, World Bank, Asian Development Bank had opposed the system and have asked the governments not to follow it. He wondered why the Chief Minister was going for the system, which has the suspicious provision of allocating the work to a preferred company.

He also recalled that the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) at its meeting on April 26, 2016 had appointed Surbana International to prepare master plan for the city and had paid Rs 14 crore. “The Singapore government had also engaged Temasek, an investment company to take up Amaravati works,” he said and added that the Temasek, in turn, had floated two private companies, Ascendas-Singbridge and Sembcrop to partner the Andhra Pradesh government in building the new capital.

He said that these companies were started with the shares of the private investors and not the government as claimed by the Chief Minister. He also wanted to know what the government will do with the Central funds, if the Singapore company builds the capital. He took strong exception to Naidu’s statement that Indian companies were fit to build only slums and recalled that several Indian companies have proved their worth. He also said that handing over the capital city construction to a private company also defeated the slogan of ‘Make in India’ and wondered why the Chief Minister was more in favour of foreign companies.

Stating that Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu claims of transparency in his government, the CPM leader asked the government to make public all documents and agreements related to Amaravati.

He said that the Chief Minister was submitting several papers to Singapore, Japan, China, UK and other countries about his plans for Amaravati and wondered why the same papers are not being made available to the people, elected representatives and political parties. He discounted the government’s claims of making Amravati a peoples’ capital and said that it had become a foreign capital or private capital.

Earlier, the CPM leader and Amaravati unit convener, Ch Baburao, said that the government was cheating the people and indulging in huge land scam. He said that the government had acquired 33,000 acres of land from the farmers, but was going to build the seed capital in just 9,000 acres, while another 10,000 acres would go to the farmers as their share.
He alleged that the government would give the remaining land to the private companies.