Andhra Pradesh Govt Moves Supreme Court Against High Court Direction To Develop Amaravati As Capital

The petition filed by Advocate Mehfooz Nazki highlights four core issues on which the petition challenges the order:

1. The issue had become infructuous since the impugned legislations had been repealed.

2. Under the Federal Structure of the Constitution, every State has an inherent right to determine where it should carry out its capital functions from.

3. To hold that State does not have the power to decide on its capital is violative of basic structure of the Constitution.

4. The judgement is violative of doctrine of Separation of Powers since it pre-empts the legislature from taking up the issue.

The Andhra Pradesh High Court bench of Chief Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra, Justice M. Satyanarayana Murthy and Justice D. V. S. S. Somayajulu had directed the State government to construct and develop Amaravati capital city and capital region within six months as agreed in the terms and conditions under the provisions of APCRDA Act of 2014 and Land Pooling Rules, 2015. Before the judgment was delivered in March 2022, the Andhra Pradesh government had decided to repeal the "three capitals" law, which proposed to develop Amaravati, Visakhapatnam, and Kurnool as the legislative, executive, and judicial capitals respectively.

The High Court had in its judgment remarked that "…State Legislature lacks competence to make any legislation for shifting, bifurcating or trifurcating the capital and Heads of Departments of the three wings of the Government including the High Court to any area other than the Capital city notified under Section3 of the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority Act, 2014 and the land pooled under the Andhra Pradesh Capital City Land Pooling Scheme (Formation and Implementation) Rules, 2015."

The High Court had also categorically held that the respondents/state had failed to keep up their promise to the petitioners who had surrendered their lands expecting developed, reconstituted plots as the State failed to complete the process of construction of Amravati City by 2018.

Around 33,000 families of Amravati had given up their land for capital region development program, however, when the Government decided to come up with the legislation for the construction of three capital cities in 2020, the families were left with no sustainable means of livelihood and therefore, they had moved the High Court challenging the move of the Government to construct three capitals in the state.