Few chief ministers have ever had a more volatile political career as the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu. After securing the title of the longest serving chief minister of the state by holding office for close to a decade in his first stint in office and then moving ahead to become the longest serving opposition leader in the state for yet another decade, Chandrababu Naidu has begun his second stint as chief minister with a big bang, firing on all rockets to emerge as a new role model for chief ministers across the country.

In his fairly short second stint in office of about a year and a quarter so far he has pushed through new projects with breath-taking speed, presided over ambitious plans and innovated and accelerated on many fronts in a manner that very few have attempted so far. What is even more impressive is that that he has also worked out long term plans to build up on these early gains.

The most recent of Naidu’s achievements has been the completion of the first link in the national water grid, which seeks to interlink the nation’s rivers, by formally connecting rivers Godavari with Krishna by completing the Pattiseema lift irrigation scheme. This will also irrigate two crops on 1.7 million acres and ensure adequate water supply in a large part of the parched Rayalseema region.

Though dating back to more than three and a half decades the project work on Pattiseema took off effectively only a decade back. But finally it was Naidu who accelerated the work on the scheme and ensured its completion in a record five and a half months and thus overtaking the Ken-Betwa project which was expected to be the first completed river linking project in the country.

Naidu now claims that he has already spend Rs 8,000 crore on irrigation and achieved double digit growth in agriculture. Now his plans are to make Andhra Pradesh a drought proof state. The focus on agriculture in his second stint in office clearly shows that he has learnt the right lessons from the unexpected setbacks in his long career.

This achievement on the farm front comes within a week of the emergence of Andhra Pradesh as the second most business friendly state lagging just a few points behind Gujarat. Naidu attributes the gains on the business front to the experience gained during his long term in office during the first stint. He claims that his emphasis on choosing the right people for the right job and laying out clear cut priorities for each department has helped improve governance in crucial segments.

And Naidu already has planned out the next big moves. Now he intends to make Andhra Pradesh one of the top three developed states in the country by 2022 and the number one state by 2029. To translate his plans into action the state has already tied up to work with the Lee Kuan Yew Institute of Excellence to further ease the ways for doing business. And the early signals are encouraging as the state has already managed to secure Rs 1.13 lakh crore of investments which are now in various stages of implementation.

The most grandiose of the Chandrababu Naidu’s new initiatives are his plans for Amaravati, the new capital of the reorganized state. The capital city with 32 kms of riverfront is being built with the active cooperation of Singapore which has helped with the master plan of the smart, green and sustainable city.

The idea is to initiate the project by building 17 sq kms as a vibrant business hub with offices and residences with metro rail, bus rapid transit, downtown roads, arterial roads and collector roads. Naidu biggest success on this front so far has been to secure the peoples participation for procuring land for the project on a voluntary basis by promising to deliver them a part of the gains by returning a portion of the developed land and ensuring annuity payments meanwhile. So far Naidu has managed to secure 33,000 acres of prime land for the capital project in lieu of a promise to return 8,000 acres of developed land to the landowners. This is one of the most innovative plans for urban development that India had attempted till now.

All these are major gains considering that the reorganization of Andhra Pradesh had left the state coffers almost empty with hardly any resources. The transfer of the then capital Hyderabad, which is the most resourceful region of the state, to Telangana robbed Andhra Pradesh off a major bulk of the taxes. And the promised compensation form the central government fell far short of expectations.

The scarcity of resources had forced Naidu to work out new plans to build a tax base for the reorganized state. Naidu’s new idea is to tap the potential of the long coast line of the state to build new ports and industrial corridors to generate employment and revenues. The Vizag Chennai industrial corridor and the corridor connecting Chennai Bangalore industrial corridor to Krishnapatnam port in Andhra Pradesh are two focus areas of the port based industrial infrastructure projects that Naidu has initiated.

Achieving these grandiose schemes will require more grit and hard work. That are qualities which Naidu has exhibited in abundance both in his years in government and as the leader of the opposition. This is sure to hold him in good stead and ensure that he soon emerges once again as the star among chief ministers as he once did many years back in the latter half of the nineties.