On 18 September Andhra Pradesh’s State Investment Promotion Board, chaired by Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, cleared 28 proposals worth Rs 22,178 crore with 19,739 jobs. That took the board’s total across 21 meetings to 387 projects, Rs 14.05 lakh crore of potential investment and about 10.79 lakh jobs, according to the state. The Federal asked the obvious question: how much of this is on the ground? In Tamil Nadu, the opposition says projects are leaving for Andhra; the Tamil Nadu government says most of the projects named went to Andhra before it took office.

This blog keeps its own record that can test both claims: the Industrial Entrepreneurs Memoranda (IEM) that large manufacturers file with DPIIT when they plan a project (Part A) and when it starts production (Part B). This piece sets the board’s total against that record, lists the largest projects behind the headline, and looks at whether the Tamil Nadu-to-Andhra story shows up in the data.

How big Rs 14 lakh crore is

Rs 14.05 lakh crore is about 77% of Andhra Pradesh’s entire 2025-26 economic output (GSDP budgeted at Rs 18.3 lakh crore). It is about 8 times the value of all large factory projects the state’s companies filed in 2020–2025, and 10 times what they commissioned in 2021–2025. At 2025’s record pace of Rs 50,680 crore a year it would take about 28 years to build; at the five-year average of Rs 28,089 crore, about 50.

The comparison is not like for like, and the gap is partly explained by that. IEM filings cover only manufacturing above a size threshold. The board’s approvals also include solar and wind farms, pumped storage, data centres, IT campuses, ports and tourism, none of which file an IEM. Bank of Baroda, counting proposals across all sectors, found Andhra had 25.3% of all new investment proposed in India in April–December 2025, about Rs 6.7 lakh crore, with power the largest sector nationally. So the state’s pipeline is genuinely large; the question is how much of it becomes projects, and how fast.

Five projects make up more than half the total

These five announcements add up to about Rs 7.1 lakh crore, 50% of the board’s headline, though not every one necessarily passed through the board. Only two, the BPCL refinery and the steel plant, worth about Rs 2.8 lakh crore together, are the kind of project that files an IEM, and both are still years from production. The two data centres and the hydrogen hub are counted in investment totals but will not appear in the factory record at all. None of the five was producing in October 2026.

The only official check on the ground so far is narrow. In July 2026 the Centre told the Lok Sabha that 10 projects monitored by DPIIT and Invest India had been grounded in Andhra over the previous two years, with about Rs 6,962 crore of estimated investment, and the opposition YSRCP says only 2 had finished construction. That list covers only projects those two agencies track, so it understates what is under way; but no fuller official count of projects started or completed has been published.

What Andhra’s factory record actually shows

Rupee figures are from this blog’s state analysis of DPIIT’s IEM data (window 2020–2025; built by year 2021–2025). The follow-through percentages are from this blog’s parse of the IEM register 2001–2024, counting Part A filings from 2015 (after the state was divided) to 2022 that later appear in a Part B list; filings after 2022 have had too little time. Built can exceed filed because projects filed before 2020 were commissioned inside the window.

On the record, Andhra is one of the better states at turning filings into factories. About 37% of the large projects its companies filed in 2015–2022 later reported production, second among these six states only to Gujarat (48%), and ahead of Telangana (32%), Maharashtra (26%), Tamil Nadu (26%) and Karnataka (21%). By value, it commissioned Rs 1.50 lakh crore in 2020–2025 against Rs 1.74 lakh crore filed, and 2025 was its best year, at Rs 50,680 crore. The problem with the Rs 14.05 lakh crore figure is not that Andhra fails to build; it is that the figure is an order of magnitude larger than anything the state has built.

Is Tamil Nadu losing projects to Andhra?

The factory record says the shift in large manufacturing is older than Tamil Nadu’s change of government. Andhra commissioned Rs 140,445 crore of large factory projects in 2021–2025 against Tamil Nadu’s Rs 44,627 crore, more than three times as much, and it out-built Tamil Nadu in four of those five years. Its filings in 2020–2025 (Rs 1.74 lakh crore) were also well ahead of Tamil Nadu’s (Rs 0.97 lakh crore). That fits The Federal’s reading that most projects cited in the current row were already headed to Andhra. It does not settle individual cases such as Hyundai’s reported shipbuilding plan, which a record ending in 2024 cannot show.

Tamil Nadu’s modest IEM numbers also need care: much of its auto and electronics base was built before this window, and expansions by existing plants may be filed differently. But for new large projects, Andhra has been the stronger destination of the two since at least 2021.

What would fix this

• Andhra Pradesh’s investment board should publish, for every approved project, the date of approval, land allotted, statutory clearances, construction start, commercial production and jobs on the payroll, updated quarterly, so “approved” can be told apart from “built”.
• States should report investment approvals split by sector (manufacturing, power, data centres, IT, tourism), so totals can be compared with DPIIT’s IEM record and with each other.
• DPIIT should resume publishing state-wise IEM Part A and Part B lists with investment values in machine-readable form, which would let any state’s claims be checked within a quarter.
• Incentive packages above a threshold (such as the reported Rs 19,100 crore for the Reliance data centre and up to Rs 28,000 crore for the steel plant) should be tabled in the state assembly with their milestones.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

What this piece could not establish

The board’s project list is not public, so this piece could not tell how much of the Rs 14.05 lakh crore is manufacturing, how much is power or data centres, or whether the five large projects are all inside it. The Rs 14.05 lakh crore and 387-project totals come from one state-government release reported by the press. The IEM record covers only manufacturing projects above Rs 50 crore of plant and machinery (Rs 125 crore from April 2025), and this blog’s matching of filings to production lists misses projects whose production entry cites neither the memorandum number nor the same company name, so the follow-through percentages are lower bounds. Project costs are as reported and differ between sources (the steel plant’s first phase is put at Rs 56,000 crore or Rs 80,000 crore). Whether the BPCL refinery received its final environmental clearance in October could not be confirmed.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.