Andhra Pradesh

The capital question Parliament finally settled

Andhra Pradesh is the south-eastern coastal state of India — and for six years it was also India’s most famous administrative experiment: the only state seriously planning to split its government across three capital cities. That experiment ended on 2 April 2026, when Parliament passed the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation (Amendment) Act, writing Amaravati into the 2014 Reorganisation Act as the state’s sole capital. The amendment took effect from 2 June 2024, the day Hyderabad ceased to be the joint capital of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

Five months later, the practical consequences arrived in court. On 25 September 2026, a Division Bench of the Andhra Pradesh High Court led by Chief Justice Lisa Gill declared that the more than 120 writ petitions filed against the three-capitals plan had become infructuous — the legal sanctity granted to Amaravati by the amended Act had dissolved the dispute. Matters that might still be pending would be examined on 20 November, with the Bench noting that appeals in the Supreme Court against the High Court’s earlier Amaravati judgment of 3 March 2022 were likely to be heard on 29 November 2026.

How the three-capitals battle began

The battle began in December 2019, when then-Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy proposed developing Amaravati, Visakhapatnam, and Kurnool as the legislative, executive, and judicial capitals respectively. In January 2020 the state Assembly approved the proposal, passing the Andhra Pradesh Decentralisation and Equal Development of All Regions Act, 2020 — with Amaravati designated the Legislative Capital, Visakhapatnam the Executive Capital, and the Kurnool urban development area the Judicial Capital — alongside a repeal of the Amaravati Capital Region Development Authority Act.

The proposal triggered widespread protests, most intensely from the farmers who had given up their land under the Land Pooling Scheme for the construction of Amaravati — the greenfield capital conceived under the previous government. In March 2022, a three-judge Bench of the Andhra Pradesh High Court ruled that the capital could not be shifted out of Amaravati, holding that the state lacked the legislative competence to reverse the decision taken in 2014–15. The YSR Congress government challenged that judgment with Special Leave Petitions in the Supreme Court, and the state only repealed the 2020 laws later. Senior counsel for the petitioners told The Hindu that his prayer for continuous mandamus had already been conceded in the 2022 judgment — by 2026, what remained before the courts was largely procedural.

The political cycle then did what litigation had not: the successor government filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court in December 2024 committing to complete the infrastructure projects in Amaravati within three years, and by September 2026 the Advocate General told the High Court that the works were proceeding at a brisk pace.

The state’s shape today

Andhra Pradesh covers 162,970 square kilometres along the Bay of Bengal, with a 2011 Census population of 49,577,103 and a literacy rate of 67.35 per cent, per the state government’s Statistical Abstract 2024. It is organised into 26 districts — doubled from 13 in one of the largest administrative reorganisations of any Indian state. The gazette notification was issued on 2 April 2022 and the new districts came into force on 4 April 2022, fulfilling Jagan Mohan Reddy’s 2019 election promise of one district per Lok Sabha constituency (the state has 25 seats), with a 26th district carved out for the tribal areas of the former East Godavari and Visakhapatnam districts.

The full roll call runs from the northern coast southward: Srikakulam, Vizianagaram, Parvathipuram Manyam, Visakhapatnam, Anakapalli, Alluri Sitaramaraju, Kakinada, Konaseema, East Godavari, Eluru, West Godavari, NTR, Guntur, Bapatla, Palnadu, Prakasam, Sri Potti Sriramulu Nellore, Tirupati, Chittoor, Annamayya, YSR Kadapa, Ananthapuramu, Sri Sathya Sai, Kurnool, and Nandyal. Srikakulam — home to the cashew-processing twin town of Palasa-Kasibugga — is the state’s northernmost district.

The state sends 25 members to the Lok Sabha and 11 to the Rajya Sabha; its bicameral legislature has 175 Assembly and 58 Council seats. The state’s gross state domestic product at current prices was estimated at ₹14,39,674 crore in 2023–24, with per-capita income of ₹2,42,479.

What this profile does not claim

It does not fix an exact day for the state’s 2014 formation — the sources establish the Reorganisation Act of 2014 and the end of the Hyderabad joint-capital arrangement on 2 June 2024, not the precise formation date. It does not rank the state nationally by area or population, name its largest city or coastline length, or project population beyond the 2011 Census, none of which were personally verified for this profile. It does not declare the capital litigation finally over: Supreme Court appeals against the March 2022 High Court judgment were reported in September 2026 as likely to be heard on 29 November 2026, and the state’s three-year Amaravati completion commitment runs to late 2027.