VIJAYAWADA:With Singapore all set to deliver the final master plan for capital for Andhra Pradesh, the officials are getting ready to fix a master developer for its implementation.
A CRDA official said the Singapore-based Centre for Liveable Cities, which had been entrusted with preparation of the final master plan, was all set to deliver it sooner than anticipated. The authorities of the centre said that they would be able to hand over the mater plan earlier than the scheduled time in June, an official of the CRDA said.
“The master developer would be finalised through Swiss Challenge method,” the official said, referring to the Cabinet decision taken recently. Under the Swiss Challenge, first a bidder will file his bid and it would be put up for a challenge. If the bids received subsequently were lower, the lowest would get it. Otherwise, the first one would get the work.
The mandate given to the Centre for Liveable Cities was to draw capital region plan for 7,325 sq km CRDA area, a capital city master plan for 125 sq km of the core capital city and a detailed master plan for seed area development in approximately 8 sq km.
The state government was almost getting to the final stages of land acquisition for construction of capital. By the time the master plan was ready and master-developer was fixed, the CRDA hopes to be in possession of 33,000 acre land. The state is invoking Land Acquisition Act for acquiring 8,000 acre multi-crop lands on Krishna river bank since it had been indicated in the draft master plan that some important buildings would be coming up there, abutting the river bank.
The officials believe that by the time master developer is decided, the government would have acquired most of the land through land pooling scheme since it is widely believed that issue of land acquisition notification is only to make the farmers fall in line and surrender their land under land pooling scheme. In fact, agriculture minister Pattipati Pulla Rao said in Guntur on Friday that farmers could surrender their land under land pooling till the end of this month.
Meanwhile, the officials are racking their brains as to how to leave villages as promised by the government untouched in the midst of high-rise buildings that would come up in the seed capital area. Even if we cross the hurdle of appointing master developer for execution of the works related to capital construction, the main challenge that would stare at them is accommodating the villages in the midst of the cities.
“Already, boundaries of all the villages have been demarcated. Outside the boundaries, the land belongs to the CRDA. The villagers would have to live within the space of the villages. Then these villages have to be linked to the main roads which is again tricky.
There would be a massive facelift to the villages by laying good roads, ensuring efficient drainage system and so on but the village is a village and the character of village would remain which would not fit in the overall picture of the capital city,” an official said wondering how this problem could be surmounted.