The leakage of a portion of experts committee headed by G N Rao on the Andhra Pradesh capital issue to a select group of media has generated a lot of heat and dust in the political circles.
It is an open secret that chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy was firm on shifting the administrative capital from Amaravati to Visakhapatnam.
Naturally, the briefing given to the experts committee also could be the same and the committee also gave its final recommendations on the same lines.
It is a natural that any committee appointed by the government will go according to the thinking of the government.
Even the Narayana Committee appointed during the TDP regime, also gave its report in favour of Amaravati as the capital city, because then chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu wanted the capital there.
So, nobody would expect the G N Rao committee to give a report that would be entirely against the interests of Jagan Mohan Reddy.
During the course of study, the committee only made certain observations on the constraints of various places including Visakhapatnam, Machilipatnam and Vijayawada in running the administration.
But ultimately, in its final recommendations, it suggested executive capital at Visakhapatnam, legislative capital at Amaravati and judicial capital at Kurnool, as per the requirement of the chief minister.
While the YSR Congress government disclosed only the operative portion of the experts committee to the media, the report carried by the pro-Telugu Desam Party media on Wednesday was only a paragraph of a big report about constraints in running administration from Visakhapatnam.
This is nothing but making much ado about nothing. What matters is the executive summary which made the final recommendations. But the pro-TDP media continued to highlight only the small reference.
On Thursday, too, Eenadu and Andhra Jyothy sought to project the constraints part of the report, quoting G N Rao who hurriedly held a press conference to clarify his point.
While admitting that there are constraints in having Visakhapatnam as the capital, he pointed out that the report clearly referred to the location of executive capital away from the coastal zone.
While Eenadu gave huge coverage to the TDP leaders’ reactions on the expert committee describing the committee reports as bogus and that Vizag is still not suitable for the capital, Andhra Jyothy accused the government of looking for establishing administrative buildings closer to the coast, in contrary to the recommendations of Rao committee report.
Sakshi confined itself to defending the decision of choosing Vizag as the capital city and made Rao’s press conference as banner saying it is the best city for being the capital.
Meanwhile, the massive rally taken up by the farmers of Amaravati continues to make the headlines in the pro-TDP papers. Apparently, these dailies want to sustain the movement as long as they can.
Sakshi has highlighted the statement of Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman G V L Narasimha Rao saying that the Centre would act according to the Constitutional norms in deciding the fate of the legislative council.
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