All AP villages to contribute clay for foundation stone laying of new capital

Hyderabad: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lay the foundation stone of Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh on October 22 on the occasion of Dussehra festival. The grand ceremony to be held at the Uddarayanapalem village of Thullur mandal in Guntur district will also be attended by the ministers and officials from Singapore and Japan. While Singapore has prepared an ambitious master plan for the new capital, Andhra Pradesh government has also sought the cooperation from Japan to build the state of art city.

Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu had personally called on the prime minister and invited him to lay the foundation stone of the new capital. The state government has sent out 150,000 invitations for the ceremony to people from all over the state. A massive public meeting will be held at the Acharya Nagarjuna University grounds to be addressed by the prime minister and the chief minister.

Giving a dramatic touch to the event, clay will be brought from all the 13,000 villages and 3,000 municipalities of Andhra Pradesh to be used in the foundation laying ceremony to make it truly representative. Similarly the water from all the sacred rivers and rivulets will also be used in the ceremony.

Special seating arrangements will be made for the farmers who had surrendered their lands under the land pooling arrangements for the construction of the new city over an area of more than 50,000 acres. 33,000 acres of them were taken from the farmers.

According to the schedule finalised on Friday, the prime minister will arrive at Gannvaram airport of Vijayawada at 1145 am and the foundation stone laying program will start at auspicious hour of 1235 pm amid the chanting of hymns. Prime Minister Modi and the chief minister will participate in the rituals led by Vedic pundits followed by the public meeting which will also be addressed by some union ministers.

Modi will leave at 3.45 pm for Tirupati where he will inaugurate the newly built airport terminal and perform puja (religious ritual) at Tirumala temple before returning to New Delhi in the evening.

The preparations were on in full swing at the venue of the ceremony as hundreds of workers with heavy equipments were busy in leveling the ground and preparing a helipad for the ten choppers of VIPs to land.

“On the whole 250 acres of area was being prepared for the event”, said Ch Sridhar, Joint Collector who was supervising the arrangements.

Chief Minister Naidu had also extended invitations to the prime ministers of Japan and Singapore to attend the event but only ministers will be representing their governments.

Naidu, who reviewed the arrangements and preparations wanted the officials not to leave any stone unturned to make the event successful as a huge crowd was expected from all parts of the state. He directed the officials to illuminate Guntur, Vijaywada and other major cities of the state during the ten day long Dussehra festival to make the event of foundation laying memorable.

While the Naidu administration was excited over the plans, a discordant note was struck by some astrologers who warned that the hour of 12:35 to 12:45 fixed for foundation stone laying was the worst possible time to do so. “It is not an auspicious hour”, said a prominent astrologer R Narasimha Murthy.