"Five years is at once a short and a long period, and our contrasting experiences with these two Indian state governments—Bihar and Andhra Pradesh—indicate that both hope and caution are in order."

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From our distant perch in Japan, it seems to us that the reputations of these two Indian states are belied by our experiences in each. Nobody thinks that Bihar is a good place to work, while Andhra Pradesh has posters throughout international airports describing it as the most “business-friendly” state in the country. In fact, the Bihar government has shown sophistication and intelligence as an architectural client, while the Andhra Pradesh government has revealed mostly confusion and inconsistency. Our perspective on these places and their politics may be somewhat limited, but we can definitely state that if the Bihar government had acted like their counterparts in Andhra Pradesh, the 25,000-square-metre Bihar Museum would not be opening this year. In Andhra Pradesh, “business-friendly” seems much closer to “business as usual” in India.

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At Amaravati, the experience was a complete contrast. The competition itself was well organised, and the international jury was chaired by leading architects, design practitioners, and pedagogues like Christopher Charles Benninger, KT Ravindran, Erwin Viray, Süha Özkan, Rajeev Sethi, and Keshav Varma, the ex-municipal commissioner of Ahmedabad. They provided objective results based on stated design criteria, and avoided suspect selection processes. A full day was dedicated to each team’s presentation, and the participants were fairly compensated. But once the competition ended, there were no more checks and balances, just a farcical revolving door of ever-changing opinions to consider. No clear approval processes were in place, the jury disappeared, and the jury report was never released to the public.

The Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority (which administers the project on behalf of the government) threw up its hands to follow orders from above—while their employees empathised with us, privately of course, over how unfairly Maki and Associates was being treated. Most shockingly, we were never given the chance to show competition revisions to the government, despite being asked for these revisions by the chief minister, N Chandrababu Naidu, himself.

On 24 October, Maki and Associates was officially terminated for reasons that are demonstrably false. A new RFQ (‘Request for Quotation’: a standard business process used to invite participants in a bidding process) was launched on 25 October—the very next day!—and in early December, Foster and Partners of London, with Architect Hafeez Contractor of Mumbai, were selected. The announcement of this team has been decidedly muted, and no new designs have been presented to the public. It is unclear if designs even exist, though it is known that the winning team spent a good deal of time in Amaravati prior to the RFQ. Having Foster and Contractor do this work was clearly a pre-set priority for the government, though it remains to be seen if—with over 1,000 employees, 11 different offices, and hundreds of projects scattered across the globe—Amaravati will remain a priority for Foster and Partners.

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