The prolonged suspense over the fate of three capitals for Andhra Pradesh is at last likely to end in the coming days.
After a gap of more than five months, the Andhra Pradesh high court is all set to resume hearing on three capitals issue from Monday.
The high court on Friday constituted a full bench comprising chief justice Arup Kumar Goswami, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Nainala Jayasurya to hear the cases pertaining to batch of petitions filed by the farmers of Amaravati challenging the Jagan Mohan Reddy government’s decision to form three capitals for Andhra Pradesh.
The full bench is expected to hear the petitions as regularly as possible and the state government is hoping that the issue would be settled at the earliest.
In fact, all these petitions against the two contentious bills – one on formation of three capitals and other on the abolition of AP Capital Region Development Authority, were first heard by a high court bench headed by former chief justice J K Maheshwari in the past.
However, the hearings have ended abruptly with the transfer of Justice Maheshwari to Sikkim. Later, chief justice A K Goswami, who took over from Justice Maheshwari announced in March this year that a new bench would conduct fresh hearing on all the petitions filed by the farmers of Amaravati and the counter-affidavits filed by the state government.
As a result, all the hearings of the previous bench headed by former chief justice J K Maheshwari had become infructuous.
The new bench was supposed to hear the cases afresh from May 3 and the advocate general requested that the cases be heard at the earliest, so that the government could have a smooth administration.
But, on May 2, the state high court deferred its decision to hear the cases afresh to August 23 on the ground that it was not in position to take up regular hearing of any cases in the wake of growing number of Coronavirus cases.
So, the fresh hearing is all set to resume on Monday. Unless there are any other hurdles, it is expected that the hearing would take place continuously so that the three capitals issue would be settled at the earliest.
