Bapatla

The coastal town in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, on the Buckingham Canal, with a long nationalist and educational history. The 1894 Victoria Jubilee Municipal High School was one of the earliest Western-education schools in coastal Andhra. During the independence movement Bapatla became a centre of the 1921 Non-Cooperation Movement in Andhra — Mahatma Gandhi visited in 1921 and 1934. The 1947 Partition brought large Hindu refugee populations from Sindh and the Northwest Frontier Province; the Bapatla Sindhi community remains distinct. The 1988 establishment of Acharya Nagarjuna University's Bapatla campus and the 2022 Bapatla district formation (carved out of Guntur) have made the town the administrative centre of the southern Krishna delta.