A full Bench of the Andhra Pradesh High Court reserved its judgment on the question of maintainability of a host of petitions that challenged the AP Decentralisation and Inclusive Development of All Regions and CRDA Repeal Acts of 2020 in the context of their withdrawal by the government last year and its decision to frame those laws afresh after due consultations.
Counsels for the petitioners told Chief Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra and Justices M. Satyanarayana Murthy and D.V.S.S. Somayajulu that the farmers who gave their lands for the development of Amaravati as the capital city had certain vested rights which the CRDA was obliged to fulfil.
They contended that the government lacked the legislative competence to repeal the above Acts as they were inextricably linked to the AP Reorganisation Act, 2014 which was enacted by Parliament.To state that the law meant to facilitate three capitals would be brought again in a different form altogether was all the more unacceptable, the advocates said, insisting that the aggrieved stakeholders would have a legitimate right to seek judicial remedy against it (a new law) too because the government could not proceed with its ill-advised move to split the capital into three parts without delivering on the extant promises.
Further, they rebutted the allegation that the previous government had gone about the capital planning exercise in a haphazard manner, by pointing out that a high-level committee headed by the then Municipal Administration Minister P. Narayana had availed itself of the expertise of internationally renowned consulting firm McKinsey and did a lot of homework before choosing Amaravati as the ideal location for a greenfield capital city.
The government pleaders harped on the recommendations of Boston and G.N. Rao committees and the High Power Committee, and the wisdom in letting the government’s economic capacity, not its fancies, guide the course of development of capital.
