बेबाक · Editorial
At Bhogapuram, a Credit War Obscures a Public Good Built Across Two Terms
When an airport is completed across two administrations, the traveller's gain should outrank the contest over whose name adorns the ribbon.
What has happened
From August 17, following a Civil Aviation Ministry notification, commercial flight operations will shift from Visakhapatnam Airport to the newly developed Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport at Bhogapuram. Air India has published its schedule, including four daily flights between Vijayawada and Bhogapuram, and the new services are expected to strengthen Bhogapuram Airport's position as a key aviation hub in Andhra Pradesh. On its face this is a straightforward civic gain: a new airport beginning commercial operations and improving regional connectivity. Yet the opening arrives wrapped less in the language of public service than in a running dispute over authorship — one that threatens to eclipse what the project actually delivers to passengers.
The core tension
The quarrel is over credit. The previous State government says it signed the concession agreement with GMR and completed key milestones — land acquisition, rehabilitation and resettlement of displaced families, statutory approvals, security clearances, financial closure, and water, power and internal-road works. The current administration is in office as the notified shift and first scheduled services take effect. Both claims can be held in proportion: a greenfield airport is a relay, not a sprint, and few such assets are conceived, cleared and flown within one electoral term. The tension is not really about facts; it is about which office stands at the podium. That is a poor use of a genuine public achievement.
Steel-manning both sides
Take each claim at its strongest. The previous government's case is that the spadework — acquiring land, resettling displaced families, obtaining approvals and reaching financial closure with GMR — is the hard, unglamorous part of any airport project and deserves acknowledgement. The incumbent administration's case is that the public experiences infrastructure only when commercial operations actually begin under a notified transition. Both sides can be right about their own contribution and wrong if they erase the other's. An honest public accounting would credit the GMR concession framework and project milestones to the phase in which they occurred, the operational shift to the phase in which flights begin, and let the traveller be the beneficiary of both.
The evidence
The record supports continuity, not a single hero. A concession agreement with GMR, financial closure, statutory and security clearances, and the resettlement of displaced families are reported as completed milestones. Six newsrooms report the August 17 shift; Air India's schedule, with four daily Vijayawada-Bhogapuram services, confirms operational reality rather than mere announcement. Around this, there is familiar political theatre — large crowds at Visakhapatnam airport for a party leader's arrival, and allegations of police restrictions, advance notices and house arrests around party programmes. These episodes produce headlines but no runways. The evidence rewards institutions, process and sequential work, not the loudest claimant.
The way forward
There is a simple, feasible discipline here. Every major public asset should carry a transparent project ledger — dated entries recording who acquired the land, who financed it, who resettled the families, who secured approvals, and when operations began — published by the executing authority, not by any party office. Ribbon-cuttings would then rest on documented fact rather than rhetoric, and successive governments could claim their genuine share without erasing predecessors. For Bhogapuram, the priority now is unglamorous: fair treatment of resettled families and dependable schedules from August 17. Infrastructure that outlives the government which opens it is the point. The citizen boarding cares about the flight, not the photograph.
A republic cannot build durable public goods if every airport becomes a trophy and every river order becomes a street test.
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