In November 1998, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then prime minister of India and Chandrababu Naidu inaugurated the HITEC City (nickanamed Cyberabad) by opening the Cyber Towers, a landmark building in Hyderabad. In anticipation of the growth of technology in the future, his government also concentrated on providing infrastructure such as roads, safety and resilience, transportation, telecommunications, IT parks and five-star hotels for the delegates' meetings and accommodation and the HITEX International Convention and Exhibition Center.
Hitech city, Hyderabad
Naidu once coined the slogan "Bye-bye Bangalore, hello Hyderabad" to further this aim and his government allotted lands and laid the foundations for major IT parks such as L&T Infocity Ascendas Park, Cyber Gateway, Raheja Mindspace Madhapur IT Park, and CyberPearl IT Park etc.
in 1999, Naidu established the Pharma City, an original, state-of-the-art biotechnology park in the country to the north of Hyderabad and promoted Genome Valley to leading multinational pharmaceutical companies like Novartis Pharma India, Shantha Biotechnics, Bharat Biotech, Biocon, Biological E. Limited, Jupiter Biosciences, and also requested other global IT companies like IBM, Dell, HSBC, Oracle Corporation to move to Hyderabad, making presentations to global CEOs and convincing them to invest and establish offices in Hyderabad.
The Rajiv Gandhi International Aiport, an initiative of Naidu
Demands of a separate Telangana state
In 1997, the state unit of the BJP passed a resolution seeking a separate Telangana. In 2000, Congress party MLAs from the Telangana region who supported a separate Telangana state formed the Telangana Congress Legislators Forum and submitted memorandum to their president Sonia Gandhi requesting to support the Telangana state.
A new party called Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), led by Kalvakuntla Chandrashekar Rao (KCR), was formed in April 2001 with the single-point agenda of creating a separate Telangana state with Hyderabad as its capital.
Protests occurred between 2004 and 2010 for Telangana. In 2006, YS Rajashekhara Reddy said that Andhra Pradesh would remain united.
Within few months of getting re-elected as popular CM, Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR) died in a helicopter crash in September 2009. This resulted in a leadership crisis within the Congress party and also created a political vacuum in the state. During this time, TRS president K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) raised his pitch for the separate state. On 29 November 2009, he started a fast-unto-death, demanding that the Congress party introduce a Telangana bill in Parliament. He was arrested by the police.
On 9 December 2009, Union Minister of Home Affairs P. Chidambaram announced that the Indian government would start the process of forming a separate Telangana state, pending the introduction and passage of a separation resolution in the Andhra Pradesh assembly.
On 12 September 2011, a day before Sakala Janula Samme (All people's strike), TRS organised a public meeting in Karimnagar which was attended by over a million people including TJAC leaders, BJP and New Democracy party leaders. On 1 November, Congress MLA Komatireddy Venkat Reddy started an indefinite hunger strike until the central government announced a roadmap for Telangana state.
In September 2012, Sushilkumar Shinde, the newly appointed Home minister of India commented that the Telangana demand needs to be handled carefully since similarly carved smaller states saw increased Naxal problems. AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi said that “Muslims would not accept a separate state”.
2014 — The official bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh
On 30 July 2013, the Congress Working Committee unanimously passed a resolution to recommend the formation of a separate Telangana state. After various stages the bill was placed in the Parliament of India in February 2014. In February 2014, Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014 bill was passed by the Parliament of India for the formation of Telangana state comprising ten districts from north-western Andhra Pradesh. President signed the bill on 1st March 2014.
The state of Telangana was officially formed on 2 June 2014. Kalvakuntla Chandrashekar Rao was elected as the first chief minister of Telangana, following elections in which the Telangana Rashtra Samithi party secured majority.
Hyderabad will remain as the joint capital of both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for a period, not more than ten years after that period Hyderabad shall be the capital of the state of Telangana and there shall be a new capital for the state of Andhra Pradesh. Andhra Pradesh picked Amaravati as its capital and moved its secretariat in 2016 and legislature in March 2017 to its new capital.
Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh under construction