Bill to recognise Amaravati as A.P. capital likely to be tabled in Lok Sabha

The Union government is likely to introduce the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill, 2026, in the current Lok Sabha session to officially recognise Amaravati as the sole capital of Andhra Pradesh.

Senior sources in the government said the move follows a resolution passed by the Andhra Pradesh Assembly on March 28, 2026, urging the Centre to amend the law to incorporate Amaravati as the State’s capital. Copies of the Bill have been circulated among MPs.

The Bill proposes to amend Section 5 of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014, which had originally designated Hyderabad as the common capital for both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for a period not exceeding 10 years.

The move comes after a long process of settling a capital city for Andhra Pradesh after the bifurcation of the erstwhile State in 2014 into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. At that time, the Union government had set up a committee of experts, as mandated under Section 6 of the Act, to explore the question of a new capital. The members of that committee included K. C. Siva Ramakrishnan, then chairperson of the governing board of the Centre for Policy Research, Rathin Roy, then director of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, Aromar Revi, then director of Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Jagan Shah, then director National Institute of Urban Affairs, and K. T. Ravindran, former dean of the School of Planning and Architecture.

The committee had submitted a report in August that year. Though it had opposed the idea of a ‘super capital’ apprehending ecological damage among other issues, the Chandrababu Naidu-led Telugu Desam Party government began land acquisition and rolled out other initiatives in the State’s Guntur district to establish Amaravati as the capital.

When the government changed in 2019, with the YSRCP helmed by Jagan Mohan Reddy in power, work stalled as the new Chief Minister was not in favour of a shift of the State’s capital to Amaravati. Alleging that too much money was being spent on it, he proposed instead a “three capitals” formula, suggesting Visakhapatnam as the executive capital, Kurnool as the judicial capital, and Amaravati as the legislative capital.

When the TDP returned to power in 2024, Mr. Naidu revived the Amaravati plan.

Sources in the State government said that investors who were on board in the past had been spooked by the change of plans in 2019, and therefore to insulate the settlement of a new capital from political vagaries, Amaravati has to be established in the statute books.

Legal sanctity for the new capital is only possible after a gazette notification following the passage of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganistaion (Amendment) Bill, 2026.