The many-rajdhani route to riches

Today’s Andhra Pradesh could teach Karl Marx a lesson or two on primitive capital accumulation. Having had to cede Hyderabad to the recently created Telangana, Andhra needed a new rajdhani.
Having initially cold-storaged former CM Chandrababu Naidu’s pet project of developing Amaravati, the YS Jagan Mohan Reddy government has now unveiled a proposal to have not just one capital but three, a legislative capital at Amaravati, an executive capital at Visakhapatnam, and a judicial capital at Kurnool.

Such a literal interpretation of the need to separate the branches of the state in a democratic polity would have got full Marx as a way of capital formation through the creation of multiple capitals.

Indeed, given the increasingly urgent need to provide a stimulus to a stubbornly sluggish national economy, other states might be motivated to follow Andhra Pradesh and infuse capital into the system by the multiplication of capitals.

Taking a leaf from the order book of the British Raj, which, in addition to shifting the capital from what was then Calcutta to create a new capital in New Delhi, also made what was then Simla into a summer capital, it could be mooted that apart from a summer capital and a winter capital, states could also have a spring capital and a monsoon capital.

Such a project could truly be called a venture capital scheme, to cap-it-all.