At 76, Naidu pedals 5.5 km of midday heat for a greener Visakhapatnam

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Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, District Collector M. Abhishikth Kishore and Pendurthi MLA Panchakarla Ramesh Babu riding bicycles to mark World Environment Day, on Beach Road in Visakhapatnam on Friday. | Photo Credit: K.R. Deepak

Andhra University has seen many ceremonies. Chancellors, convocations, visiting dignitaries, planting saplings with the practised ease of people who know they are being photographed. Friday’s World Environment Day programme at the AU Engineering Grounds was, for the most part, that kind of occasion. Then the Chief Minister got on an e-bicycle and rode 5.5 kilometres through the city in the midday heat, and it became something else.

Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu cycles down Visakhapatnam's Beach Road on World Environment Day, Friday. pic.twitter.com/TVBvnvxAu2

N. Chandrababu Naidu, 76, had arrived by helicopter at 10.20 a.m., landing at a helipad set up within the campus. The coastal heat was already considerable, the mercury above 35 degrees Celsius, and the humidity around 70%. When someone pointed out that the programme was being held in punishing summer heat, Mr. Naidu was unfazed. That, he said, was precisely the reason more trees needed to be planted. He planted a sapling. He addressed the media. And then he said, with the directness that has long marked his public manner, that only 25% of this 450-acre campus was green and that this was not good enough.

The comparison he reached for was Tirumala, where greenery now covers nearly 90% of the hills. Andhra University, he said, should aspire to the same. He directed Vice-Chancellor G. P. Raja Sekhar to work towards a net-zero campus, with solar panels on buildings generating enough power for all university needs, vacant land given over to trees and waste processed into biogas. The campus, in his telling, should become a biodiversity park and a knowledge hub, a place that teaches sustainability by embodying it.

The ambition extended beyond the campus. Mr. Naidu said the State was commi