Crowd funding for Amaravati, new capital of Andhra Pradesh, is gaining pace in the digital way. The sale of digital bricks for Amaravati has now crossed ₹50 lakh-mark indicating the growing interest to get associated with the upcoming new city. As on on Thursday, the total number of donors stood at 2.25 lakh while total number of bricks collected is 54.89 lakh.
Donor’s name on brick The initiative, ‘My Brick, My Amaravati’ was launched in October 2015 as a crowd funding initiative by the government in a participatory mode. Under this, a person is allowed to buy a digital brick for ₹10 and his/her name is engraved on it and is kept in a repository for ever.
“The idea of the government is not only to ensure people’s participation but also get donations. It is a kind of brand building and we are happy with the response so far. We expect the contributions to go up further as administration will go for shifting its base to new capital from Hyderabad in June,” a senior official of Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA) told BusinessLine .
Plans are also afoot for stepping up donations campaign for the capital by cash-strapped State government which has not been able to gain any significant special assistance from the Centre so far for the project.
₹1-lakh cr programme According to State government estimates it will need a minimum of ₹1 lakh crore to construct the new city though detailed phase-wise fund requirement has not been disclosed properly so far.
Meanwhile, construction work on the core capital region as well as the secretariat building as commenced even as the government readied the plans to shift the secretariat by June this year.
A senior official panel headed by Lingaraj Panigrahi, Special Principal Secretary, Department of General Administration, AP, is all set to name the departments to be shifted out of Hyderabad on April 18 after finalising the preliminary list it has already prepared, said a senior official.
There are 18,000 employees working in 33 departments of the Secretariat who will have to be shifted to Amaravati.