Vijayawada: With the TDP-led NDA govt back at the helm, residents of Vijayawada city are seeking to revive the two-decade-old proposal to upgrade the Vijayawada Municipal Corporation (VMC) into the Greater Vijayawada Municipal Corporation (GVMC). Around 4,000 respondents who participated in an online survey conducted by a private social media page voted in favour of Vijayawada becoming a Greater Municipal Corporation.
Out of 4,150 samples collected by the survey team of the online page, 4,029 people supported the proposal to make Vijayawada a ‘Greater Vijayawada,’ showing that 90.1% of people in Vijayawada and the surrounding areas strongly advocate for a greater municipal corporation.
Vijayawada municipality was created on April 1, 1888, and was upgraded to a selection-grade municipality in 1960. It was subsequently elevated to a municipal corporation two decades later, in 1981. In 1985, the neighbouring panchayats of Gunadala, Patamata, Bhavani Puram, and Payakapuram were merged into the corporation limits. The municipal corporation currently spans 61.88 square kilometres, making it one of the largest in the state.
However, the exponential growth of the city in all four directions over the past decade, along with the inclusion of many neighbouring panchayats such as Kanuru, Yanamalakuduru, Poranki, Tadigadapa, Enikepadu, Prasadampadu, and other localities into the urban fabric—where tens of thousands of residential houses and establishments have come up—has made it a herculean task for these panchayats to ensure basic civic amenities such as sanitation, drinking water, and more. This has highlighted the need to merge these localities into the VMC and upgrade it into a greater municipality to provide better amenities.
It is estimated that the municipal corporation would span anywhere between 300 to 400 sq km from the current 61.88 sq km after the merger of the neighbouring panchayats, making it the largest municipal corporation in the state.
