Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu was reviewing the progress of Andhra Pradesh’s new capital city project earlier this week, when he asked his officers to explore whether Amaravati could have only plug points and no fuel stations. He asked them to consult experts on whether this could be a city only for electrical cars and not for conventional vehicles.The idea is still a gleam in Naidu’s eye, but Amaravati holds out the promise of being a city like no other in India. Among the innovative features on the drawing board are navigation canals around the city and connecting an island in the river Krishna. These have been embedded into the design of the new capital of Andhra Pradesh , a state that was left with no capital after Telangana inherited Hyderabad three years ago amid bitter rivalry.Amaravati, being built on a 217 sq km open field in Guntur district, is being designed to have 51% of green spaces and 10% of water bodies, with a plan to house some of the most iconic buildings there. The city is being modelled on Singapore, with the masterplan being prepared by two Singapore government-appointed consultants. Other international consultants and architects will then be roped in to give it an international flavour.On the ground, what is now seen in Amaravati is the interim secretariat building, housing the temporary assembly, in a 49 acre area, with major arterial roads being constructed all around. But these are early days. According to the timeline of the Rs 58,000 crore project, the city will be populated and functional only by the end of its second phase, in 2024, when most of the buildings, luxury hotels, universities and the central business district will be operational. The third and final phase is scheduled to be completed by 2029.This means Hyderabad, which in the last couple of years attracted large new investments from the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon, will remain unchallenged in the region at least till 2024. Andhra Pradesh’s port city of Vizag is a distant second.When the new state of Telangana was carved out of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad went to Telangana, making the division apparently lopsided, at least in economic terms. Currently, Hyderabad generates 45% of Telangana’s total revenue. Andhra Pradesh, meanwhile, had to be content with the rural parts of the erstwhile state, the gains being a 974-km-long coastline with six ports, the second longest coastline after Gujarat.Telangana with Hyderabad had a head start, but the country’s youngest and 29th state has done well to build on that advantage. For instance, two years back, it enacted a law to woo investors. Under the TS-iPAS — Telangana State Industrial Project Approval and Self-Certification System — an investor can begin operations with a self-certificate and does not need to wait for government clearances. What has further boosted investor confidence is a provision in the new law under which an erring bureaucrat can be fined on a per day basis if clearances are not given on time.The results are showing. In the last three years, Telangana mustered investment commitments worth $10 billion (Rs 65,000 crore). Amazon decided to build a 3 million sq ft development centre in Hyderabad, the biggest outside its headquarters in Seattle, US. Apple too took the call to have its largest development centre outside Cupertino, California.Telangana joined Andhra Pradesh at the top of the 2016 DIPP-World Bank Ease of Doing Business ranking of states. DIPP is the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion under the Commerce and Industry Ministry.KT Rama Rao, minister for IT and industries of Telangana, however, argues that the competition for Hyderabad is global and not local. "Hyderabad has evolved over the past 430 years. Companies have invested in Hyderabad because it makes business sense. The city has talent to offer. Disaster recovery centres of many large conglomerates are based out of Hyderabad because it’s a seismologically stable zone,” Rao told ET Magazine.Rao doesn’t see Amaravati as a rival, only as one of the many cities that want to play big. "Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Indore and many other cities, for example, are trying to get a piece of the IT pie. Amaravati too will try for the same. But when we know our competition is global, why should we worry about any next-door neighbour?” Rao is the son of Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao, better known as KCR.The significance of a brand new city, however, can’t be underplayed. After all, Amaravati will be one of the few post-Independence greenfield cities, the others being Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar and Naya Raipur.What, of course, is difficult to miss is the political rivalry between Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and KCR’s Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), which persists after the bifurcation. The TDP saw an opportunity to remain politically relevant in Telangana too, as 25% of Hyderabad’s population is from Andhra. In the 2014 assembly poll, Naidu’s TDP managed 15 seats in the state, with nine coming from Hyderabad. The TRS, which eventually formed the government, managed just three out of 24 seats in Hyderabad.The politics changed when TRS managed an overwhelming majority in the 2016 Hyderabad local body elections and 13 (out of 15) TDP members of the legislative assembly defected to the TRS. Today, the TRS is informally aligned to the BJP, which is in a formal alliance with TDP in Andhra Pradesh. KCR, who initially took an anti-Narendra Modi stance, has gradually drifted towards the saffron party. That proximity may well come to the fore in case there’s a combined opposition-sponsored candidate for the next president and TRS positions itself on the BJP’s side(In pic: ​ Construction work in Andhra’s new capital city, Amaravati)For Naidu, leaving Hyderabad in less than three years — Hyderabad was made the joint capital of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for 10 years — was both a political and investment decision. Politically, his party was marginalised in Telangana while his presence in Amaravati boosts investor confidence. Today, he functions from a temporary secretariat in the midst of large agricultural fields with no habitation. The only view from the secretariat and the CM’s office is of hydraulic excavators, rollers, tractor trailers, dumpers. The CM resides in an isolated bungalow, and his residence and office are connected by a narrow road, as the 60-metre-wide major arterial roads are still under construction.Naidu has almost crossed the first hurdle of arranging 53,748 acres of land for the new city — 90% has been acquired. Only two of 29 villages, Penumeaka and Undapalli, are still opposing the plan, as villagers want better compensation. Rs 14,200 crore has been tied up mainly from state-owned Hudco and World Bank, with another Rs 14,250 crore expected from public-private partnership, bonds, a collective investment fund, lease rental discounting, among other avenues.This is a Rs 58,000 crore project, but the key will be to arrange the Rs 32,000 crore required in the first three years for creating trunk infrastructure, including road, power and telecommunications. For the project to be viable, monetising about 4,000 acres of land in the heart of the city is crucial.Once the funding is in place, hundreds of contracts will have to be awarded and almost Rs 20 crore allocated for daily construction. To ensure quality contractors come on board, the Swiss Challenge method is being adopted, a form of procurement in which an unsolicited bid is published online for others to either match or exceed it. Earlier this week, a Singapore consortium, comprising Ascendas-Singbridge and Sembcorp Development, got a contract to be the master developer of 6.84 sq km of the central business district. There was no challenger to its bid, which ensured that it bagged the contract.(In pic: Temporary secretariat in Amaravati)Attracting marquee global brands will be key to the success of the project. Says Ajay Jain, principal secretary, infrastructure, Andhra Pradesh: "You need to get a queen bee. Hyderabad grew only after Microsoft set up its big centre in the 1990s. Others simply followed”.Whether Amaravati emerges as a challenger to Hyderabad or not, its blueprint suggests that it will be a unique development. "Ours will be a green and blue city and will be more livable than any existing brown city in India,” says Sreedhar Cherukuri, commissioner, Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority. The multi-billion dollar question, though, is: will Naidu, who is often credited with bringing big investments to Hyderabad, be able to do an encore with Amaravati?Land price escalates in Amaravati as investors like Telugu NRIs show interest.Rama Rao Dhanekula from Nelapadu village of Andhra Pradesh is receiving offers from real estate agents and Telugu NRIs to sell his 12 acre plot located in the heart of Amaravati.“The offer has gone up to Rs 2.1 crore per acre, but I won’t sell my land now. Amaravati is going to be better than Hyderabad. If I can hold my land for the next five years, one acre will fetch Rs 10 to 12 crore,” says Dhanekula who two years ago participated in a voluntary land pooling scheme under which he surrendered 48 acres to the government in return for prices at a government-set rate. In addition to the price, he received almost 12 acres of developed land from the government in lieu of 48 acres that he had surrendered, and will pocket an annuity of Rs 30,000 for the next 10 years.In contrast, Narsimha Rao from Borupalam village regrets selling his land early. “I sold 1 acre to an investor even before the actual developed plot was handed over to me. I received Rs 1.45 crore. I was happy then. But I should have waited,” says Rao. Two years ago, one acre of land in the area was going for just Rs 5-8 lakh depending on soil quality and proximity to the road.Dhanekula, Rao and many other farmers in the area were engaged in tobacco cultivation — the Guntur belt was known for exporting tobacco to Russia — before they shifted to other crops such as maize, chilli and lemon. Now, they are sitting on cash, but with no agricultural work to do.While 27 villages have agreed to the voluntary land pooling exercise initiated by the government, the villagers of Penumeaka and Undapalli — the villages adjacent to the city of Vijayawada — have so far refused to surrender their land for the new capital and are negotiating for a higher compensation.Dhanekula, Rao and many other farmers are rich today, with many of them building new homes and purchasing cars. But landless farmers dependent on agriculture are bearing the brunt. “We get a pension of Rs 2,500 per month per family as we lost our livelihood after the landowners surrendered their land. But the pension is very low. And more than that, we have become idle. There’s no work for the whole day,” says Banavati Sali of Malkapuram village.(In pic: Banavati Sali)S Narsing Rao, principal secretary to Telangana CM K Chandrashekhar Rao, claims that not a single person from Andhra has been harassed in Telangana over the past three years.After three years of the creation of Telangana, arguments offered by the opponents of bifurcation have fallen flat. Those who had opposed had argued that about 25 lakh people from Andhra are living in Hyderabad and would face problems once the new state was born. Their lives would be under threat. But in the last three years there has not been a single case of any Andhra person being harassed or targeted in Hyderabad. The second reason for opposing the bifurcation was that Naxalism would grow here again. But there has not been a single Naxal incident during the last three years.Third, it was argued that Telangana would go into darkness as the electricity was produced mostly on the Andhra side. Today, the state provides 24x7 power supply and meets the need of 8,000 MW in peak season.