All these days, pro-Telugu Desam Party media houses have been shouting from roof tops over the injustice meted out to farmers of Amaravati, who had “sacrificed” thousands of acres of lands to the Andhra Pradesh government for the construction of capital city.
This section of media has been creating the impression that the YSR Congress party government has taken away food from the plates of poor farmers by proposing to shift the administrative capital from Amaravati to Visakhapatnam.
But on Saturday, the lead story carried by Eenadu Telugu daily exposed the real cause of worry of the farmers. The story is about drastic fall in real estate market value in and around Amaravati, including Krishna and Guntur districts.
The Eenadu story explains how the land values have come down from Rs 40-50 lakh per acre to less than Rs 15 lakh acre following the decision of the Jagan government to shift the capital to Visakhapatnam.
It said the farmers who had been given plots in lieu of their costly lands, are now put to heavy losses because of the fall in land values.
Besides, a large number of people, including employees, who had bought lands closer to Amaravati through bank loans and by investing their hard-earned money, are now put to heavy loss, the report said.
It clearly showed that Eenadu is more worried about the fall in land values than the real Amaravati project.
“Amaravati is just a real-estate agreement between the then TDP government and the farmers. It looks like Eenadu wants the capital to protect the real estate interests of the farmers, rather than constructing the capital itself,” an analyst pointed out.
Such reports would only damage the interests of Amaravati farmers, as there is every possibility for the people in the rest of the state to believe that they were agitating only for their real estate activity, he said.
