Put up-bifurcation, Hyderabad was to function the joint capital of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh throughout the transition interval. It grew to become the capital of Telangana in 2024.
Greater than a decade after dropping Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh has been planning a calculated comeback. It deserted the single-capital development mannequin in favor of regional industrial hubs, quicker licensing, personalized sectoral insurance policies, modifications in labor legal guidelines, and political alignment with the Middle.
This has led to a dramatic surge in home and world funding, with the state claiming greater than 1 / 4 of India’s proposed investments in 2025-26, establishing itself because the state that outperforms conventional industrial giants, primarily based on a Financial institution of Baroda report earlier this 12 months.
After returning to energy in 2024, Naidu and his officers started “diversifying sectors, diversifying investments and localizing employment insurance policies,” mentioned an official who spoke to ThePrint. Central to this technique was to maneuver away from over-reliance on Andhra Pradesh’s administrative hubs of Vijayawada and Amaravati, he harassed.
The industries division has rapidly mapped 4 areas – Uttarandhra, Rayalaseema, Delta and South Andhra into financial zones primarily based on useful resource availability and earmarked them as hubs to be marketed as area for particular sectors. To do that, a planning division and an industrial division had been shaped, and step one in coverage reforms was the institution of the Andhra Pradesh Financial Improvement Board.
In contrast to the present nodal businesses beneath the economic sector, such because the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Company (APIIC) and the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Improvement Company (APIDC), which perform as funding promotion businesses, the Andhra Pradesh Financial Improvement Board (APEDB) was established in 2016 with a particular constitution.
“Our aim was not solely funding era but additionally redirection and realization of funding. This new reform wanted to be accomplished as an virtually vocal nationwide technique with the intention to profit all areas of the state,” a senior APEDB official informed The Print about APIDC, which created the one window for funding.
The coverage reforms had been complemented by trade associations organized beneath the present Andhra Pradesh Chamber of Commerce and Business together with greater than a dozen sectoral our bodies.
“The bifurcation of the state (throughout the Congress rule) set again the clock by practically 25 years and there have been many challenges to catch up in each area and each sector. We restructured as a result of the one solution to construct momentum and speed up the movement of funding was to shut the regional hole in industrial growth,” mentioned Potluli Bhaskar Rao, present chairman of each chambers.
Earlier than the state boundaries had been redrawn, Visakhapatnam (Vizag) was identified for its pharmaceutical, enterprise course of outsourcing (BPO) and data technology-enabled companies (ITeS) sectors. Vizag’s pharmaceutical panorama was characterised by main pharmaceutical firms corresponding to Aurobindo Pharma, Laurus Labs, Natco Pharma, Eisai Prescribed drugs and Grand Pharma, all primarily based at Jawaharlal Nehru Pharma Metropolis, a park for pharmaceutical manufacturing and export.
A remapping of the area’s financial power since 2014 confirmed that Visakhapatnam continues to be a major a part of the financial system, with metal, prescribed drugs, IT sectors and information centres, favoring it as one of the best funding vacation spot after Hyderabad. Consequently, firms corresponding to HSBC, IBM, Infosys, Tech Mahindra and TCS have arrange operations within the coastal metropolis.
In the meantime, the southern districts of Nellore, Prakasam and Tirupati have been earmarked for thriving mining, electronics and defense-related aerospace industries, together with Sriharikota, India’s essential spaceport for satellite tv for pc launches in Nellore.
The placid coastal area north of Nellore from Kakinada to Srikakulam has been declared a PCPIR (Petroleum, Chemical compounds and Petrochemical Funding Area) zone.
As soon as generally known as the ‘Rice Bowl of India’, the Krishna-Guntur-Godavari delta area was reserved for industrial use attributable to its clayey alluvial soils.
As Andhra is the biggest producer of tobacco and largest exporter of seafood, its aquaculture, agriculture, MSME, and meals processing industries later got here to be referred to as dwelling to central Andhra Pradesh.
In the meantime, the arid Rayalaseema area, which boasted eight CMs, was demarcated as a zone containing 90 % of India’s barite reserves (a bulking agent in oil and fuel drilling muds that forestalls blowouts) and 48 completely different minerals.
Due to this fact, the area has develop into fertile floor for photo voltaic vitality utilization and Greenko Group has arrange an built-in renewable vitality storage undertaking at Pinapuram in Kurnool district. The undertaking might be commissioned by the tip of 2025 and is reportedly at the moment delivering practically 20GWh of vitality every day.
Subsequently, South Korea’s Kia Motors selected to arrange India’s first car manufacturing unit in Anantapur, which was formally established by the then CM YS Jagan Mohan Reddy in December 2019, making the area a hub for renewable vitality and car sectors.
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new mantra
After his Telugu Desam Social gathering (TDP) was folded into the NDA authorities on the Middle, it grew to become an important reference level for formidable and big-ticket worldwide investments to movement in throughout Naidu’s second time period, mentioned Narendra Saranam, vice-president, Confederation of Indian Business.
“In the course of the first interval, Andhra was not in a really sturdy place and the inflows of funding additionally seemed to be dispersed because the state authorities was nonetheless growing ample infrastructure throughout the state for the funding activation state of affairs,” Saranam defined.
In 2024, when Naidu’s Telugu Desam Social gathering and NDA received an amazing majority by profitable 164 out of 175 seats within the Andhra Meeting, CM Naidu was decided to show the state into an industrial powerhouse, a cupboard colleague informed ThePrint on situation of anonymity.
“In our first cupboard assembly, we had been informed that our purpose is to rework Andhra’s potential into efficiency,” mentioned a colleague, additional quipping that Naidu’s growth path appears to have taken a leaf from Prime Minister Modi’s “Reform, Efficiency, Transformation” mannequin. However leveraging being an ally of the NDA means greater than reflecting the Centre’s Vikshit Bharat imaginative and prescient, the colleague added.
Andhra has give you 22 sectoral insurance policies with incentives tailor-made to each trade and each area. Previous legal guidelines corresponding to non-agricultural land valuations have been repealed and license charges for a lot of companies have been decreased. Holding in thoughts the tourism potential of the state’s temples and coastal areas, the long-pending demand for the tourism sector to be acknowledged as an trade was additionally handed.
A shock modification was made in mid-2025 because the coverage was simplified and an funding monitoring system was launched to make sure approval inside a month of signing the MoU.
Andhra has amended its labor legal guidelines to extend most working hours to 10 hours a day, Data and Public Relations Minister Ok. Parthasarathy introduced the amendments to the labor legal guidelines.
The minister later clarified that the amendments additionally apply to non-public firms and factories, rising the extra time restrict from 75 hours to 144 hours per quarter.
This modification confronted sturdy opposition from commerce unions. In line with studies, on July 9, 2025, hundreds of thousands of staff throughout India took half in a large nationwide basic strike, or ‘Bharat Bandh’, to protest towards the financial and labor insurance policies of the NDA.
Nonetheless, whereas the employees’ protests didn’t attain Amaravati, the industrialists’ applause did.
Ease of doing enterprise is not the brand new mantra echoing within the corridors of energy of the industrialists who joined Naidu on the reform desk. It is the pace of enterprise.
“Immediately’s businessmen are wanting past land and incentives to predictable enterprise outcomes and a productive workforce. And labor code reform is central to speedy industrial development that can result in financial and social transformation,” Murali Krishna Gannamani, Chairman and Managing Director of Fluent Grid and Chairman of the Confederation of Indian Business, informed ThePrint.
end result? Home and international funding has been steadily rising since June 2024, when Mr. Naidu’s second time period started.
In early January 2026, Andhra Financial institution cited Financial institution of Baroda’s funding report and declared that it had acquired 25.3 per cent of India’s whole proposed investments within the first 9 months of FY 2026 (April to December 2025), making it India’s main funding vacation spot.
In line with information compiled by the Middle for Monitoring Indian Financial system (CMIE), funding intentions throughout India reached Rs 26.62 billion throughout the identical interval.
Though the BoB report doesn’t quantify or map investments by area, information collected from Andorra’s industrial sector reveals that the coverage experiment of diversifying investments labored.
“Transfer ahead”
The economic facilities of Sri Metropolis in Nellore (south), Visakhapatnam (north) and Anantapur (west) had been closely capitalized and the opposite eight districts of the state additionally had outstanding firms to boast of.
In February 2026, the provider introduced an funding of Rs 1,000 crore in a brand new manufacturing facility in Sri Metropolis, additional strengthening its place as a cooling hub.
Greater than 90% of the landed funding amounting to Rs 2.3 billion comes from the personal sector. The most important 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 listing with 22.6% of the whole funding, adopted by chemical substances (21.8%) and metals (17.3%).
If construction and technique shaped the pillars on which subsequent main investments had been constructed, shut alignment between the ruling BJP on the heart and the TDP within the state offered buyers with political stability and certainty. Companies from throughout India flocked to AP.
Indosol Photo voltaic has dedicated Rs 15,000 crore for part 1 of its built-in solar energy manufacturing facility in Ramayapatnam, with plans to achieve 10 GW of manufacturing capability by 2026. Dalmia Group has introduced its intention to arrange a cement manufacturing plant in Kadapa at a value of Rs 2,883 crore from Kolkata. Mayfair Group has partnered with Taj and Marriott to assist AP increase its hospitality with a Rs 400-crore resort in Bhogapuram, a seaside city on the sting of Vizianagaram district.
In interviews with The Print, former Related Press bureaucrats defined that these funding wins weren’t as a result of provision of extra land and decreased tax legal responsibility, nor to the CM’s enviable drive. Andhra was profitable as a result of it acknowledged the strategic worth, not simply the quantity, of its investments and acted rapidly. Whereas outdated rivals Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu and new competitor Telangana depend on their inherent strengths and historic standing as a star funding vacation spot, Andhra has demonstrated competitiveness on a number of fronts.
This agility was complemented by what each the BJP and TDP leaders described because the synergy of a “twin-engine authorities.” The TDP is the NDA authorities’s greatest ally with 16 MPs, and the Middle has prolonged crucial help starting from being an unofficial guarantor to deliver again Singapore for the event of Amaravati to sanctioning a semiconductor facility in Kurnool beneath the Indian Semiconductor Mission 2.0, which some states, together with Telangana, felt had been favoring AP over different candidates. The Union Price range for 2024-25 has already signaled this partnership, with Rs 15,000 crore earmarked for the event of Amaravati and Rs 12,157 crore for the Polavaram irrigation undertaking, amongst others.
Surya Teja Malavalapu, IAS, Managing Director, Know-how Providers, Andhra Pradesh, informed ThePrint that firms appreciated the ecosystem constructed for every trade, including that Andhra’s robust negotiations and willingness to rapidly resolve administrative bottlenecks helped consolidate investments throughout the district. He personally oversaw the method by which Google’s largest AI heart in India was introduced in Andhra Pradesh, and assisted Tata Consultancy Providers and Lulu World Worldwide in pledging Rs 1.37 billion and Rs 1.5 billion respectively to the state.
Enterprise gamers argue that the state’s multi-sector funding yields are proof of a profitable recalibration and re-envisioning of regional integration, which is maybe why IT and HRD Minister Nara Lokesh tweeted in January 2026, after the discharge of the central financial institution’s report, “Andhra Pradesh isn’t catching up, it is transferring ahead.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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