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A Case of How Not to Tackle the Most Essential Component of a New State -The Capital That Wandered: Twelve Years of Andhra Pradesh Searching for Its Own Address

*An essay on indecision as the most expensive infrastructure project of all* ---------------------- ## Where, exactly, is the capital? Ask the question literally, and the answer scatters. Drive out of Vijayawada across the Krishna and you reach Velagapudi, where an "interim" Secretariat — a cluster of functional blocks thrown up in 2016, meant to last five years — has now housed the government of Andhra Pradesh for a decade. The Assembly meets in a building carrying the same adjective. The High Court sits at Nelapadu in a structure that was always described as temporary. The Chief Minister's residence and camp office are across the river at Tadepalli — technically the capital region, practically a suburb of Vijayawada. A few kilometres away stand the half-risen towers of the original master plan, skeletons that weathered years of abandonment before the cranes returned. Scattered between paddy fields: the campuses of SRM, VIT and Amrita that opened on schedule and kept tea...
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The Quiet Housing Revolution: How the Telugu States Rewrote India's Contract with the Poor

Every generation leaves behind a monument to the society it tried to build. Ancient kingdoms left temples and forts. Industrial economies left railways and factories. Independent India, for much of its first half-century, left something rather less visible: millions of families to build their own homes. For decades after 1947, shelter occupied an odd place in Indian public policy. Governments accepted responsibility for dams, schools, roads and hospitals, but not for ensuring that the poorest citizens had a permanent roof over their heads. Across the country, families erected mud walls, thatched roofs, tin sheds and tarpaulin shelters, adding a brick here and a concrete slab there whenever a harvest was good or a son sent money home from the city. A house was expected to emerge gradually over a lifetime of sacrifice. Poverty was not merely low income; it was also the insecurity of never quite knowing whether the next monsoon or cyclone would leave a family homeless again. That unw...
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