Nara Lokesh, Andhra’s rising star

PICTURESQUE EXPANSES of vivid green pastures unfold on either side of the road leading from Vijayawada towards Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh’s resplendent upcoming greenfield capital city. Equally pristine is chief minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu’s residence, located at Undavalli, alongside the banks of river Krishna. While the river flows in tranquility, the visitors’ hall is teeming with people — not like those traditional political offices — but more like the lobby of a global investment bank, abuzz with executives in business suits, sifting through presentations on their tabs, or huddling with their teams for crucial eleventh-hour discussions, and occasionally exchanging pleasantries with other visitors. All these representatives — either from technology companies, steelmakers, renewable energy firms, data-centre developers or electronics manufacturers — want a slice of Swarna Andhra, a strategic vision of the Naidu-led government to transform the state into a $2.4 trillion-plus (₹308 lakh crore-plus) economy by 2047, with a per capita income of over $42,000 and exports exceeding $450 billion. “I hate to be late,” says Nara Lokesh, who walks into the special guest room to meet the Fortune India team. It’s 30 minutes past the scheduled time, but the delay is understandable. Lokesh, dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark navy-blue trousers, is the man of the moment. As the Minister for IT, Electronics and Education, and the national working president of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which stormed back into power in 2024, Lokesh is the government’s chief dealmaker and executor, having learnt the ropes from his father, N. Chandrababu Naidu, widely known as the “CEO CM”. For investors, Naidu’s only son and political heir personifies the state government’s promise of fast decisions and faster execution. That’s not surprising. Within two years of being sworn into power, the state government has attracted ₹11.48 lakh crore investments across 284 projects. It’s not just the biggest names from India Inc. but also those from the Silicon Valley which are making a beeline to the state. Google is setting up its largest AI hub outside the U.S. in Visakhapatnam for $15 billion. Arcelor Mittal/Nippon Steel is eyeing a ₹70,000-crore unit at Rajayyapeta in Anakapalli district. South Korean giant LG is setting up its third manufacturing plant in Sri City for ₹7,000 crore. The country’s largest private sector company by market cap, Reliance Industries, too, is building a ₹1.08-lakh-crore giga-scale AI data centre in Visakhapatnam, with another ₹65,000-crore commitment for green energy initiatives in the state. Additionally, 420 projects are at the discussion stage, according to the Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board (APEDB), with mega investments planned in infrastructure, including ports and airports, and Amaravati cornering a lion’s share of ₹85,000 crore, which includes iconic buildings and a quantum valley. Mega achievements indeed. But for Lokesh, it’s just the beginning. “I am not in the business of signing MoUs. I want projects to be grounded. That is what India wants,” says the 43-year-old Lokesh as he settles down in a square-shaped sofa seater. A proactive approach towards attracting investments and expeditious clearances have earned Nara Lokesh the sobriquet of “Palli Palli” minister from a Korean friend. The Korean phrase means “quickly quickly”. Lokesh embraces the moniker wholeheartedly. In true “palli palli” spirit, despite complexities, mega projects have taken off in record time. Take Google for instance. Within 16 months of signing the MoU in December 2024, the ground-breaking took place in April this year. Ditto with LG. Discussions began in June 2024, the foundation was laid in May last year. The rollcall is long and impressive (See graphic: A robust investment pipeline). If Naidu’s first stint as the CM was all about IT and ITeS, this time, it’s quantum computing. Earlier this year, the state inaugurated India’s indigenous quantum computing testbeds — one at SRM University in Amaravati and another virtually at Medha Towers in Gannavaram — as part of the Amaravati Quantum Valley initiative. The government hopes the ecosystem will position Andhra Pradesh among the country’s leading destinations for advanced computing research. For Lokesh, Swarna Andhra@2047 is a statement of aspiration: “Mr Naidu often tells us he is tired of Indians hearing only stories from China or elsewhere. He wants to replicate the same… something about which Indians will be proud of. People might criticise us on whether we need such iconic buildings [in Amaravati]. But what is wrong with Indians aspiring for something world-class?” There’s no one better than Lokesh to execute his father’s vision. What makes the combo potent is that Lokesh is unarguably the country’s only political scion to have an undergraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon University and MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To top it all, he has learnt politics the long and arduous way. His father spent 15 of the preceding 20 years out of power: a 10-year stretch from 2004 to 2014, and another five from 2019 to 2024. The single lesson he returns to most often when asked what separates the current term of government from the one before it: the discipline of governing is only half the job; the other half is staying close enough to the ground to hear trouble coming before it arrives. “Historically, if you’ve seen TDP’s defeat has happened when we’ve taken the electorate for granted. We go about doing work, but we don’t spend enough time communicating the work we’ve done. This time we are lot more cognizant of what is happening in the field,” says Lokesh. DISCIPLINE DRIVES THE WAY Discipline shaped Lokesh long before he entered politics. Growing up in one of the country’s most influential political families, privilege never translated into entitlement. Lokesh’s arrival was, almost symbolically, tied to his family’s political story. He was born in January 1983, the same month when his maternal grandfather, the legendary Telugu actor Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao and the founder of TDP, was sworn in as chief minister for the first time. Over the years, Naidu established his own distinct legacy within the party and beyond NTR’s shadow. That dual inheritance — his grandfather’s legacy and the tech-led governance model of Naidu — is the base of his political education. “NTR had a legacy and character to himself. My leader Naiduji has a character and a legacy of his own. For me, it has been the best of both worlds,” Lokesh says proudly. But growing up among such powerful personalities was less about privilege. Discipline was non-negotiable and applied without exception. “Mr NTR was a stickler for discipline,” Lokesh recalls. “My mother [Bhuvaneswari Nara] inherited that from him. We were never allowed to throw our weight around.” With Naxal violence at its peak, which also led to the assassination of a former state minister in a landmine blast in 2000, it was Lokesh’s mother, more than anyone, who urged him to pursue his education abroad, reasoning that it would offer both safety and a wider canvas to the world. Lokesh is candid that the American system suited him better academically than India’s exam-centric one with Carnegie Mellon rewarding critical and analytical thinking over rote memorisation. “I’m not a hard learner, not a rote student. I’m more a critical, analytical thinker,” he says. But it was the culture around him, as much as the coursework, that shaped him. Surrounded by classmates with what he describes as “fire in their belly,” he spent nearly every summer and winter break working rather than returning home. His early years of working at DaimlerChrysler in Germany, General Electric, the Singapore Prime Minister’s Office for PS21 — public service for the 21st century, and later the World Bank, exposed him to processes and systems. No wonder, the state is looking at the key performance indicators (KPI) approach to meet targets. “The beauty of the political ecosystem in AP, being led by a regional party, is that when my leader sets a goal, everyone works towards achieving that. Mera KPI kya hai [what is my KPI] is on the top of everyone’s mind. All of us may be firing at different rates. But that’s the excitement we have.” “The state currently monitors around 650 KPIs, making capacity building across various administrative levels essential for estimating growth and tracking economic progress effectively,” says S. Mahendra Dev, chairman, Economic Advisory Council to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. THE GOLDEN GOAL Rather than concentrating development in a single city the way Cyberabad was concentrated in Hyderabad, in the current stint, the Naidu government is taking a cluster-based approach. “This is Naiduji 4.0. That is the larger vision. If you know Mr Naidu, if he dreams, he will deliver. Or, he will create a team which will deliver … He lives and breathes his dreams, and it is infectious. All of us get into that mould. A lot of things we borrow from what he did in Hyderabad, but one thing we have done is to decentralise it,” says Lokesh. The state is developing the Visakhapatnam economic corridor with a focus on green hydrogen, petrochemicals, iron and steel, and IT and shipbuilding, the Amaravati economic corridor (finance, quantum, deeptech, R&D), the Tirupati economic corridor (space, electronics, semiconductor, defence, tourism), as well as other thematic clusters. The model was shaped by what Lokesh observed on an official trip to Busan, South Korea’s shipbuilding cluster, where roughly 360 companies engaged in producing steel, rivets, navigation systems, cranes, firefighting equipment and the likes make up a single ecosystem, and a similar 250-company automotive cluster making seatbelts, bumpers, wipers, glass, electronics around Kia. “For me, it’s not simply about attracting the company that assembles a phone in Andhra. There are about a thousand companies that go into making all these components. I want to bring all thousand into that cluster,” mentions Lokesh. In fact, the state’s investment promotion body, APEDB, is compiling data on the hundreds of ancillary and component manufacturers that would need to co-locate around any anchor investment. Alongside the larger clusters, the government is also building MSME parks across 175 constituencies, aimed as much at small and micro enterprises. “This will give people from disadvantaged backgrounds a way out of the poverty cycle through localised manufacturing jobs,” explains Lokesh. With the policy blueprint and execution models firmly in place, the state is eyeing the next big leap in the investment bandwagon. The Swarna Andhra goals will increase the industry’s contribution to GSDP (gross state domestic product), points out the state’s industries and commerce secretary N. Yuvaraj. The ratio of industrial output to Andhra’s GSDP currently stands at 23%. The aim is to reach 33% by 2047. “We are targeting more investments. It is not a myth or an inflated figure when the leadership says we are attracting investments worth ₹20 lakh crore. Out of this, ₹11.76 lakh crore is where agreements are in place, land costs are paid, projects are grounded and incentives have been rolled out,” says Yuvaraj. APEDB has its target in sight for the next four months. “We track 1,000 leads at any given point of time... Some of them get dropped, some get into the system,” says Shan Mohan Sagili, CEO, APEDB. “More than 420+ projects are in different stages of MoUs. Around 300 more are in the pipeline. The priority is to get all the projects grounded before the CII Partnership Summit at Visakhapatnam in November. We don’t want to be seen as a state which will enter only into MoUs, but as a state which is able to convert these leads into concrete projects,” he adds. The state is also pumping in mega investments into ports and plans to exploit its 1,054-km coastline, the second largest in the country, for port-led growth. It is also betting big on shipbuilding. “We will deliver two shipbuilding clusters very soon. This is the dream of our prime minister and chief minister. They are very clear that we have to do it,” Lokesh says. Greenfield ports are being developed at Ramayapatnam, Machilipatnam, Kakinada, Visakhapatnam and Mulapeta, entailing an investment of about ₹23,000 crore. “The state finalised its Maritime Development Policy in 2024. As per the policy, the government plans to have an allied maritime facility every 50 km,” says Praveen Adhithya C.V., CEO, Andhra Pradesh Maritime Board. THE AMARAVATI STORY No single project captures the scale of the state government’s ambition quite like the revival of Amaravati as Andhra Pradesh’s capital. Built on land voluntarily pooled from more than 29,000 farmers, the master plan for the capital envisions nine integrated sub-cities built around government, finance, education and health, designed for decentralised growth rather than a single dense core. Those who gave up their land will be offered developed plots and are being paid annuity, while the landless community dependent on the land for income are being provided pension in lieu of the loss of livelihood. They have also been roped into skill development schemes for future employability. “Land pooling alters the basic relationship between a landowner and the city being built on their land. Instead of a one-time payout, landowners receive developed plots and participate directly in the value that urbanisation creates over time. That is a fundamentally different proposition from conventional acquisition, and it’s the mechanism Amaravati is being built on,” says Anshuman Magazine, chairman & CEO, India, South-East Asia, Middle East and North Africa, CBRE. “Any model that converts landowners from adversaries into stakeholders deserves attention. Land pooling isn’t a new idea globally. It’s behind a significant share of Tokyo’s post-war urban development, and it shaped Gangnam (Seoul, South Korea) from what was originally farmland. India already has its own precedent too: Gujarat has used a Town Planning Scheme model for land pooling and readjustment across cities like Ahmedabad for decades,” Magazine adds. Spread across 8,352 square km, Amaravati is envisioned as a happy city with the highest standards of liveability and sustainability. The master plan has been prepared by the government of Singapore with support of Surbana Jurong, the Singapore-based prominent urban planning firm. “A lot of thought has gone behind it. We believe it is going to set a mark for the entire nation. You will see Amaravati take shape and the economy firing on all cylinders. Think about a V12 engine. One of the cylinders will be Amaravati,” says an excited Lokesh. The Andhra Pradesh development model, with the right mix of the old and the sunrise segments, is drawing attention. “The state’s long coastline offers immense potential to build a robust marine economy, while its highly educated workforce can help drive the adoption of emerging technologies such as AI,” adds Mahendra Dev. THE POLICY SHIFT One of the key pillars of the state’s journey in galvanising investments has been a strategic shift in its policy landscape over the past two years. It has pulled in investors to Andhra over competing states such as Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. A case in point being the investment made by LG. “In any state, unless the land is registered in the name of the company, the government does not provide approvals. Similarly, AM/NS could not level the land since it did not have the environmental clearance. We levelled the land, constructed the compound wall, and gave it to them. This kind of facilitation is not possible in other states,” says Yuvaraj. Lokesh credits it to the three Ss — speed and stability of policy delivery, and services in the government. “If anyone has a problem, I am there. We take feedback very positively. We are very proactive… the strength of an institution is to identify and accept weaknesses and build on top of it.” The state government has come up with 26 policies across segments to facilitate investments in the last two years. “We are going to roll out another four-five policies … Our policies are very dynamic. They provide a focussed approach,” says Yuvaraj. For Lokesh, dreams alone are insufficient. Execution remains the differentiator. “Today, I am like the Dolo 650 of Andhra Pradesh. [If] anyone has a headache, everyone knows there is one crazy guy called Lokesh, wo kar dega (he will do it). But at the end of the day, institutional capacity and execution prowess have to be built. That is exactly what we are doing,” he adds. Sure enough, he is trying to set up systems and institutions to increase the speed of doing business. His next big frontiers include institutional development for sustainable growth, and job creation. “Am I absolutely seamless? No. I believe that we are halfway there,” he says, adding, in the next six months, systems and institutions will be robust enough to handle things on their own without his intervention. The state government is sending ministers and teachers to Singapore to learn best practices and deploy them in decision-making. On the employment and jobs front, Lokesh heads a group of ministers tasked with creating 2 million jobs in the state. What differentiates Lokesh from the rest is he can think like an entrepreneur to deliver outcomes. A large part of that learning comes from his days while running the family’s dairy business. THE ENTREPRENEURIAL ZEAL Long before he entered politics, Lokesh’s formative years, when back in India, was spent in running the family's dairy company, Heritage Foods, which he joined in 2008, straight out of Stanford. “Heritage played a very important role in shaping my character,” says Lokesh. It was trial by fire as the company was losing money: ₹6 crore in the very first month on the job. Over the following three years, he helped turn around the company by bringing down the debt from around ₹260 crore to around ₹100 crore, including working capital. “That meant hard conversations. A 12-month consolidation pause, letting people go... having that discussion with the board as a 25-year-old was enriching. We did it as amicably as we could, and it has shaped my character and helped me understand how to engineer turnarounds in tough situations. There’s a process, a way to do it properly,” explains Lokesh. Listed since 1995, the family currently holds 53% stake in the company, with full public-market governance and disclosure standards. “We never had a qualified audit in all these years,” says Lokesh, explaining that the legacy has instilled a frugality and an accountability that he has tried to carry into his current role. “Every rupee matters in the dairy business, which is a very thin-margin business. I try to bring that same frugality orientation in running the government.” He goes on to reveal a lesser-known fact that his father, too, was a serial entrepreneur whose earlier ventures in hospitality, in carbide, and in a large-scale mango horticulture project failed before Heritage succeeded. “None of the setbacks deterred him. All these happened when he was in politics. Such is his spirit. He always believed the family should never depend on politics for income,” says Lokesh. In fact, the family residence is a rented private house, the family’s vehicles, including the CM’s official car, are privately owned, not government provided. His wife, Brahmani Nara, also a Stanford graduate, now runs day-to-day operations at Heritage and, in his description, has become more identified with the brand. “She lives and breathes the brand more than I do,” says Lokesh with a smile. BUILDING A LEGACY OF HIS OWN On whether he sees himself eventually as the chief minister, Lokesh chooses to be diplomatic in his response. “Look at developed nations. It’s always one leader who often plays a pivotal role in the transition. Be it Park [Chung Hee] in South Korea, Mahathir [Mohamad] in Malaysia, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. In India, I’d point to [P.V.] Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, and [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee’s years in government, though they don’t always get full credit. Now under Modiji there’s a lot more momentum nationally. I believe I’m fortunate to be in the right place with the right ingredients of leadership around me — a supportive Prime Minister, a CM who’s also my father, and my own ability to move policy forward,” explains Lokesh. As powerful as it appears, politics can be a humbling experience as well. Lokesh knows that better when he had to face criticism for not contesting polls and securing a ministerial berth in TDP’s previous term. Though he contested the 2019 Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly elections from the Mangalagiri constituency, he narrowly lost to YSR Congress Party’s candidate by 5,337 votes. That election was a major setback for both Lokesh and his father, as the TDP suffered its worst defeat, winning just 23 out of 175 seats. But the turnaround has been truly inspirational: the party won 135 out of 144 contested seats. In fact, in the run-up to the 2024 elections, Lokesh hit the ground running, connecting with the masses on a scale that he had never done before. The efforts paid off: he won the Mangalagiri constituency, which the TDP had never won for 39 years, with a resounding margin of over 91,000 votes. So much so that Lokesh has chronicled this journey into a hard-bound book that he ensures is given as a souvenir to all those who matter. “I hope one day people will say there was someone called Lokesh who made a difference in Andhra. The only way to leave that mark is by creating jobs at every level. Being a minister is simply a vehicle for that. Even out of power, we’ve never stopped working and that’s always been our approach,” says Lokesh. With that philosophy, heritage, and entrepreneurial zeal, Lokesh has set out on a journey to becoming a visionary reformer.

Nara Lokesh, Andhra’s rising star

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