India tries to build a world-class city from scratch, and looks to Singapore for help
AMARAVATI, India - On a wide stretch of land bisected by India's Krishna River, bananas, sugarcane, cotton, guavas and commercial flowers once sprung from dark soil that people described as a farmer's paradise.
But the leader of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh saw this as the ideal spot to build a new capital, and in the last four years the land has slowly been transformed.
The crops are nearly all gone now, the farmers having signed over their plots to the state government. Cows meander alongside freshly paved highways, motorized rickshaws haul construction materials instead of crops and giant concrete shells are rising from the earth as the sprawling city of Amaravati takes shape.
Staggeringly expensive
