Publish-bifurcation, Hyderabad was to function the shared, joint capital of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for a transition interval. It turned Telangana’s Capital in 2024.

Greater than a decade after dropping Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh has engineered a calculated comeback—ditching the single-Capital progress mannequin in favour of region-wise industrial hubs, fast-tracked clearances, customised sectoral insurance policies, change in labour legal guidelines, and political alignment with the Centre.

This has led to a dramatic surge in home and international funding, with the state claiming over 1 / 4 of India’s proposed investments in FY2025–26 based mostly on a Financial institution of Baroda report earlier this yr, positioning itself as a state outpacing conventional industrial heavyweights.

After coming again to energy in 2024, Naidu and his officers started “a diversification of sectors, the decentralisation of funding, and the localisation of the employment coverage,” the official who spoke to ThePrint has shared. What was central to this technique was transferring away from the over-reliance on Vijayawada and Amaravati, the executive nodes of Andhra Pradesh, he emphasised.

The industries division swiftly mapped the 4 areas—Uttarandhra, Rayalaseema, Delta, and Southern Andhra—into financial zones based mostly on useful resource availability and earmarked them into hubs to market them as particular sectoral areas. To implement this, the planning and industries departments had been put into service, and the primary steps to reform insurance policies led to the creation of the Andhra Pradesh Financial Growth Board.

Not like the present nodal our bodies beneath the trade division, such because the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Company Restricted (APIIC) and the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Growth Company (APIDC), which act as funding facilitators, the Andhra Pradesh Financial Growth Board (APEDB) was arrange in 2016 with a particular constitution.

“Our purpose was not simply funding creation, but in addition funding redirection and fructification. This new reform needed to be perfected virtually as a vocal statecraft if all areas of the state needed to profit,” a senior official of the APEDB instructed The Print in regards to the APIDC, which created a single level of contact for investments.

Coverage reform was complemented by trade our bodies, which had been structured, together with over a dozen sectoral our bodies, beneath the already-existing Andhra Pradesh Chambers of Commerce.

“The clock was set again by practically 25 years due to the bifurcation of the state [during Congress rule], and there was a number of catching as much as do for each area and each sector. We reorganised ourselves as a result of the one method to construct momentum and speed up the circulate of funding was to plug the inter-regional disparities in industrial growth,” the now-president of the chambers, Potluri Bhaskar Rao, stated.

Earlier than the state boundaries had been redrawn, Visakhapatnam (Vizag) was identified for its pharmaceutical, Enterprise Course of Outsourcing (BPO), and Data Know-how Enabled Companies (ITeS) items. Vizag’s pharma-landscape was characterised by main drug producers, similar to Aurobindo Pharma, Laurus Labs, Natco Pharma, Eisai Prescription drugs, and Gland Pharma, housed within the Jawaharlal Nehru Pharma Metropolis, a park devoted to manufacturing and exporting medicines.

With the post-2014 re-mapping of financial strengths in each area displaying that Visakhapatnam remained a big a part of the economic system, with its metal, pharmaceutical, and IT items, in addition to information centres, it was championed as the subsequent greatest investor vacation spot after Hyderabad. Consequently, HSBC, IBM, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, TCS, amongst others, arrange operations within the coastal metropolis.

In the meantime, the southern districts of Nellore, Prakasam, and Tirupati had been earmarked for the flourishing of mining, electronics, and defence-related aerospace industries, together with Sriharikota, India’s major spaceport for launching satellites in Nellore.

Northward from Nellore, the balmy coastal area—upwards from Kakinada to Srikakulam—was declared to be the PCPIR or Petroleum, Chemical compounds, and Petrochemicals Funding Area zone.

The delta areas of Krishna, Guntur and Godavari—as soon as often known as the ‘rice bowl of India’—had been reserved for industries, relying on the clayey alluvial soil.

With Andhra being the highest producer of tobacco and the highest exporter of seafood, its aquaculture, agricultural, MSME, and meals processing industries had been to later name central Andhra Pradesh their residence.

Then again, the arid Rayalaseema area, whose glory was producing eight CMs, was demarcated as a zone with 90 p.c of India’s Baryte reserves—a weighting agent in oil and gasoline drilling muds that forestalls blowouts—together with 48 totally different minerals.

The area, due to this fact, turned a fertile floor for harnessing photo voltaic vitality, with the Greenko Group establishing the Built-in Renewable Power Storage Undertaking at Pinnapuram in Kurnool district. Commissioned by late-2025, the venture is now reportedly delivering practically 20 GWh of vitality day by day.

Subsequently, South Korea’s Kia Vehicles selected to arrange its first Indian automotive manufacturing unit in Anantapur—formally inaugurated in December 2019 by then-CM Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy—the area turned the capital for renewable vitality and vehicle sectors.

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A brand new mantra

The plan to decentralise investments turned a definitive reference level for formidable, big-ticket worldwide investments to circulate in in Naidu’s second time period after his Telugu Desam Occasion (TDP) was dovetailed into the NDA authorities on the Centre, Narendra Saranam, Vice Chairman, Confederation of Indian Industries, instructed The Print.

“In the course of the first time period, Andhra was not ready of energy, and the investments that got here in appeared scattered as a result of the state authorities was nonetheless creating ample infrastructure throughout the state for a revitalised funding situation,” Saranam defined.

In 2024, when the Naidu-led Telugu Desam Occasion and the NDA received a thumping majority, successful 164 out of 175 seats within the Andhra meeting, CM Naidu made up his thoughts to show the state into an industrial powerhouse, a colleague in his Cupboard instructed ThePrint on the situation of anonymity.

“In our very first Cupboard assembly, we had been instructed that our purpose was to show Andhra’s potential into efficiency,” the colleague stated, additional quipping that Naidu’s pathway for growth seemed like he had taken a leaf out of Prime Minister Modi’s ‘reform, carry out, remodel’ mannequin. However making the most of being an NDA ally meant greater than mirroring the Centre’s Viksit Bharat imaginative and prescient, the colleague added.

Andhra got here up with 22 sectoral insurance policies with incentives being customised for each trade and all areas. Previous acts, such because the Non-Agricultural Lands Evaluation, had been abolished, and the license charge for a lot of companies was decreased. A protracted-pending demand of the tourism sector to be recognised as an trade additionally handed muster, maintaining the state’s temple and coastal tourism potential in thoughts.

With insurance policies simplified and an funding tracker put in place for approvals to be granted inside a month of MoU signing, a shock modification got here in mid 2025.

Andhra amended its labour legal guidelines and elevated the utmost working hours to 10 hours a day, with  Data & Public Relations Minister Okay. Parthasarathy saying the amendments to the labour legislation.

The minister later clarified that the modification utilized to non-public companies and factories, and that the additional time cap had been elevated from 75 hours per quarter to 144 hours.

The amendments confronted sturdy backlash from labour unions. On 9 July 2025, hundreds of thousands of employees throughout India participated in an enormous nationwide basic strike, or ‘Bharat Bandh’, to protest the NDA’s financial and labour insurance policies, in line with experiences.

However whereas the employees’ protests didn’t carry to Amaravati, the industrialists’ applause did.

The brand new mantra echoing in corridors of energy amongst industrialists, who sat on the reform desk with Naidu, just isn’t ease of enterprise anymore; it’s velocity of enterprise.

“Past land and incentives, industrialists at present are searching for predictable enterprise outcomes and a productive workforce. And reforms in labour codes are central to the speedy industrial progress leading to financial and social transformation,” Murali Krishna Gannamani, Chairman and Managing Director of Fluentgrid, and Chairperson of Confederation of Indian Business, instructed The Print.

The outcomes? Home and international funding has climbed steadily, beginning in June 2024, when Naidu’s second time period commenced.

In early January 2026, citing a Financial institution of Baroda funding report, Andhra declared that it had netted 25.3 p.c of India’s complete proposed investments within the first 9 months of the 2026 monetary yr—April to December 2025—making it India’s main funding vacation spot.

The info, compiled from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Financial system (CMIE), confirmed funding intentions throughout India stood at Rs 26.62 lakh crore throughout the interval.

Whereas the BoB report doesn’t quantify or map investments region-wise, information gleaned from Andhra’s industries departments has revealed that its coverage experiment of decentralisation of investments labored.

‘Pulling forward’

The Sri Metropolis industrial hub in Nellore (South), Visakhapatnam (North), and Anantapur (West) acquired the heavy load of capital, whereas eight different districts throughout the state’s geography had massive names to boast, too.

In February 2026, Provider introduced a Rs 1,000 crore funding for a brand new manufacturing facility in Sri Metropolis, additional cementing its place as a cooling hub.

Greater than 90 p.c of the landed investments amounting to Rs 2.3 lakh crore got here from the personal sector. The biggest share of those investments got here from the facility sector, metals and chemical industries.

In line with the Financial institution of Baroda report, renewable vitality topped the charts, accounting for 22.6 p.c of complete funding, adopted by chemical compounds (21.8 p.c) and metals (17.3 p.c) .

If construction and technique shaped the foundational pillars for heavy-duty investments to comply with, a more in-depth huddle between the ruling BJP on the centre and the TDP within the state lent the traders political stability and certainty. Firms from throughout India flocked to AP.

Indosol Photo voltaic pledged Rs 15,000 crore for Part-1 of its built-in photo voltaic manufacturing facility at Ramayapatnam, with plans to achieve 10 GW capability by 2026 . From Kolkata, Dalmia Group introduced its intention to arrange a cement manufacturing plant in Kadapa for Rs 2,883 crore. The Mayfair Group joined Taj and Marriott to assist AP broaden its hospitality surge with a Rs 400 crore resort in Bhogapuram, a seaside city on the sting of Vizianagaram district.

Former AP bureaucrats spoke to The Print and defined that these funding wins weren’t due to providing extra land and fewer tax legal responsibility, or the enviable drive of the CM. Andhra succeeded as a result of it moved swiftly, recognising the strategic worth of the investments extra than simply the quantum of it. Whereas its previous rivals Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and its new competitor Telangana, had been counting on their intrinsic strengths and historic standing of being celeb funding locations, Andhra displayed aggressive engagement on a number of fronts.

This agility was complemented by what each BJP and TDP leaders describe as a “double-engine authorities” synergy. With the TDP being the biggest ally within the NDA authorities with 16 Lok Sabha MPs, the Centre prolonged essential help, from standing as an casual guarantor to convey Singapore again for Amaravati’s growth, to sanctioning a semiconductor facility in Kurnool beneath India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 that some states, together with Telangana, felt favoured AP over different contenders. The Union Price range 2024-25 had already signalled this partnership, allocating Rs 15,000 crore particularly for Amaravati’s growth and Rs 12,157 crore for the Polavaram irrigation venture.

Chatting with ThePrint, Surya Teja Mallavarapu, IAS, Managing Director of Andhra Pradesh Know-how Companies, added that corporations appreciated the ecosystem created for every trade, confirming that Andhra’s hard-nosed bargaining and its willingness to expedite administrative bottlenecks helped within the district-wise consolidation of investments. He personally oversaw the processes when Google Inc’s largest AI Centre in India was introduced in Andhra Pradesh, in addition to assisted Tata Consultancy Companies and Lulu International Worldwide, after they pledged Rs 1,370 crore and Rs 1,500 crore, respectively, within the state.

Industrialists say the state’s multisectoral funding yields are an affidavit to a profitable recalibration and reimagination of regional integration, which is maybe why the IT and HRD minister Nara Lokesh tweeted in January 2026, after the BoB report was launched: “Andhra Pradesh isn’t catching up, it’s pulling forward”.

(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)

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