CHAPTER IV.
AGRICULTURE AND IRRIGATION.
Agricultural Statistics — The crops most grown — Indigo — Sugar-cane — Jnte — Others. Cur.TiVATioN Methods — On the hills — The Agricultural .Association. Irrigation — The protected area — Wells — Tanks — Channels — From the Varaha — From the Sarada — From the Nagavali — The Nagavali project. Economic Condition of Agriculturists.
More than nine-tenths of Vizagapatam consists of zamindari land, and of the remaining- tenth a fifth is whole inam. Conse- quently agricultural statistics are available for only about eight per cent, of the area of the district, namely for the ryotwari and minor inam land in the three Grovernment taluks of Golgonda, Palkonda and Sarvasiddhi. Figures for these are appended, but the three areas differ widely in their soils, rainfall and facilities for irrigation, and cannot be considered representative of the district as a whole : —
Taluk. Percentage of area by survey which is Percentage of area in village accounts of "u o u o a a .a 1 s N3 Forest and other area not available for cultivation. Cultivable waste other than fallow. u o 2 o a <D U e3 ® 8 h
O Golgonda Palkonda Sarvasiddhi ... 70-7 58-2 36-0 22 5-3 6-6 7-9 13-6 4-3 19-2 22-9 531 67-8 38-1 32-8 2-5 5-4 4-2 56 6-0 11-2 24-1 50-0 51-8 7-2 25-7 271
The divergencies in the circumstauces of the three taluks are further exhibited in the following statistics of the percentage of the assessed wet and dry land, respectively, iu eaoh which is
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The percentage of the total area cropped in each of these taluks and also in certain zamindari areas (including the Vizianagram estate) which was cultivated with the more important crops in fasli 1313 is given below:—
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Indigo was extensively cultivated in Pálkonda during Messrs. Arbuthnot's lease of that taluk (see p. 289), but in consequence of competition from the German synthetic dye it is now no longer grown and the indigo factories are all in ruins.
Sugar-cane is chiefly raised in Pálkonda taluk (ef. p. 290) and in the valley of the Sárada round Anakápalle (see p. 124). In the former place the commonest cane is a small, hard, white variety which seems, to be the same as the désaváli cane of Gódávari.1[1] Round Anakápalle, at least eight kinds are recognized of which the Rayagada and dubbukéli are the most popular, and all of them are heavy varieties which require wrapping and propping to save them from damage by storms. Mauritius canes were tried as long ago as 1839 by M.R.Ry. Godé Súrya Prakása Rao of Anakápalle (see p. 219) and also by Messrs. Arbuthnot & Co., in Pálkonda, but did not do well. A new striped Mauritius variety, called after Mr. H. F. W. Gillman, I.C.S., who imported it in 1899 when in charge of the Vizianagram zamindari, now bids fair, nowever, to oust all the indigenous kinds. In Anakápalle cuttings are often obtained 2[2] from the stunted canes grown on alkaline land, which, though they produce only the poorest jaggery, make excellent seed-cane.
The 'jute' of the district (which is really Hibiscus cannabinus 'the Deccan hemp', and is locally known as erra gogu) has risen into much prominence recently owing to the increase in the price of the fibre from Rs. 26 per candy of 500 lb. to Rs. 45. It is chiefly grown on red soils in the centre of the district round Bobbili, Sálúr, Gajapatinagaram, etc. This being all zamindari land, the acreage sown is not ascertainable with exactness but has been computed at 49,000 acres. Deep ploughing and plentiful manuring improve the product. Two crops are grown, of which the first is sown in May and June and reaped in August or September, and the second is put down in June and July. The former is much the less important of the two; its fibre is shorter than that of the latter, but, as water is plentiful when it is harvested, is better cleaned. The cleaning is always done by soaking the whole plant in water for a fortnight or three weeks and then beating it on a stone to loosen the outer bark. The fibre thus obtained is again washed and then dried and taken either to Kalingapatam or (more generally) to Bimlipatam. Some of it is pressed into bales by machinery and exported, and the rest is spun and woven into gunny at Messrs. Arbuthnot's steam mill (see p.228) at Chittivalasa. The hemp is well known in the markets in Europe, where it is considered as good as the Calcutta jute. The rise in price is already, however, leading to extreme carelessness among the ryots in cleaning the fibre.
Wheat is raised on the hills as a dry crop, but is poor stuff. Niger, mustard and turmeric are other characteristic crops in the Agency . The Rája of Vizianagram has a coffee plantation under European supervision at Anantagiri, about 3,000 feet up the hill below Gálikonda.
The ryots of the district divide the agricultural year into three seasons; namely, punása, the period of the south-west monsoon, when the staple dry grains are sown; pedda panta, the regular wet-crop season from August to December; and payira, the period from November to April when the second dry crop is raised with the aid of the north-east monsoon. The year is also divided into the 27 kárles or asterisms of the lunar zodiac, and the ryots commonly hold that each of these asterisms is the proper season for certain agricultural operations and believe that if, owing to want of rain or other preventing cause, that season is allowed to pass, the particular operation cannot afterwards be carried out with equal chances of success. The joint result is that (see p. 151) cultivation operations of some sort are proceeding for ten months out of the twelve. Tables of the dates of seed-time and harvest appear in G,0. No. 784, Revenue, dated 15th September 1897. The punása crops are by far the most important, as they comprise cambu and ragi, the staple food of the mass of the people, and a failure of the south-west monsoon is a serious calamity. In several directions methods of cultivation in Vizagapatam differ from those in the south. Rice-fields (especially in Pálkonda, where the Nágávali silt is very rich) are often left unmanured for years together, but the seedlings are given a good start by plentiful supplies of fertilizers to the seed-beds. Where manures are used, the wild indigo and sunn hemp plants are frequently ploughed in when green. Dry land, on the other hand, which in the south is often neglected, is here usually plentifully manured, especially with tank silt, and ragi and cambu (and sometimes cholam) instead of being sown are transplanted in dry fields from seed-beds after rain, the seedlings being put out by hand in a furrow and their roots covered over by ploughing another furrow alongside. Instead, again, of being threshed directly they are harvested, as in the south, the crops are often stacked on the fields for months until the ryot has nothing more emergent to do. Except in Pálkonda, double crops of paddy are rare, the wet-fields being either utilized, after the paddy has been removed, for growing gingelly, green gram, or a multiplicity of garden crops and vegetables, usually with the help of wells; or being sown with ragi during the south-west monsoon and then with paddy with the north-east rains later on. The paddy is of very numerous varieties, differing from taluk to taluk, and it is not possible to point to any one kind as being universally the most popular. Vizagapatam rice has a high character and it is said that at one time rice used regularly to be sent from Gódávari to Anakápalle to be exported again as Vizagapatam rice.
On the hills the paddy is practically all of it rain-fed, but on the 3,000 feet plateau some is raised in the beds of nullahs and irrigated with their water. Gunupur, Jeypore and Naurangpur taluks (see the accounts of these in Chapter XV) are the three tracts where most is raised. Gunupur rice is favourably known as far afield as Calcutta. The crops grown in poducultivation (see p. Ill) are usually dry grains like sámai, hill cholam and the like. The greater part of the seed is thrown on the higher part of the patch and left to be washed down to the lower portions by the rains. The careful terracing of the hills carried out by the Savaras in Gunupur is alluded to on p. 257.
In 1904 an Agricultural Association was formed at Vizagapatam. It has held two most successful cattle shows and has opened an experimental farm on 21 acres of land near Vizianagram granted by the Rája's adoptive sister. The District Board will very shortly open a veterinary hospital at Vizagapatam. The chief irrigation sources in the three Government taluks are the Varaha in Golgonda; this river and the Sarada in Savvasiddhi; and, in Pdlkonda, the Nagavali and its tributary the Suvavnamuklii. The area protected by these (and by minor tanks and channels) in each of the taluks is shown below : —
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It will be seen that it is considerable only in Palkonda. The great difference in the area safeguarded in ordinary and in all seasons in Sarvasiddhi is due to the fact that the taluk lies at the tail of the Varaha and Sdrada channels and so suffers considerably if the seasons are adverse, as the upper anicuts (sometimes private property) take all the water. This evil promises to increase rather than diminish, as the present tendency is to replace inferior and temporary anicuts by permanent and substantial works.
In this district wells are of comparatively small importance. The returns show only 7,293 * of them, of which 2,840 are supplementary wells dug in wet land and used chiefly for growing the second crops thereon already referred to. Less than a score of the whole number are pucka constructions with revetments, the average well being a big irregular pit with crumbling sides. The picottah is the universal water-lift, motes being unknown. The buckets are made of riveted sheet iron or of the hoUowed-out root end of a palmyra, bound round the top with hoop iron. For small lifts of three or four feet from channels to fields, the swinging basket, operated by two ropes on each side held by two men facing one another, is very common. It generallj spills half its contents each swing. In places an ingenious tool, resembling a long-handled shovel with a string attached to the lower end of the shaft, is used for sprinkling water from the well-channels over garden crops such as ragi and chillies. The shovel is dipped into the water and brought out with a jerk by means of the string.
The tanks are mostly small. Only two of them, namely, the Tiinks. Rdmasdgaram tank in Vakapddu and the Pedda tank of Uppalam, both in Sarvasiddhi taluk, have an ayacut of over 1,00U acres. In the PAlkonda taluk they often have no proper sluices, and the ryots get the water out by cutting the embankments.
A Tank Restoration Party has investigated 142 of these works irrigating JiO,OUO acres assessed at Rs. 55,000, and spent nearly U lakhs upon them. This is expected to raise the area irrigable by them to 22,500 acres and the revenue to Rs. 90.000
The most important sources of irrigation are the channels Channels. from the four rivers already mentioned.
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On the Vardha there are eight Government anicuts,* of which the uppermost, the Gabbdda dam, lies three miles north-north-west of Narasapatam, and was built in 1862-63 at a cost of Rs. 17,630. It supplies the tanks at Narasapatam and its neighbour Balighattam. An affluent of the Varaha, known as the Sarpanadi or Kottakota stream, is crossed by five smaller anicuts, a channel from one of which fiRs the natural lake at Kottakota called the Komaravolu dva, which irrigates some 430 acres.
Both the Varaha and Sarada channels are thought to be less constant in supply than in former years and the blame has been laid upon the clearance of the forests on the Golgonda and Mddgole hills.
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On the Sarada there are eight anicuts t belonging to Government, the most important of them being the Godari dam, which is the uppermost of the series and supplies the big natural lake called the Konda- karla ava, about six miles south of Anakapalle. This reservoir, which has been artificially enlarged and never quite dries up, holds an available supply for eight or nine months in the year and irrigates 2,500 acres in twelve villages, some of them zamindari land. Proposals have been made to extend the cultivation under it by still further increasing its capacity, but the difficulty and cost of the scheme have led to its abandonment. This lake and the channels under the Godári anicut were the only irrigation sources which were placed, at the last settlement of Golgonda and Sarvasiddhi, in the first class and in the same category as the Nágávali channels and the tanks fed directly from them in Pálkonda taluk. On the Gókiváda gedda, a spill channel, are six lesser anicuts; and, on the Málagedda, a seventh. A combined regulator and surplus weir across the former is under construction.
The Nágávali and Suvarnamukhi channels are 41 in number, but only four — the Nílánagaram, Venkamma and Honzarám channels from the Nágávali and the Sékharapalli from the Suvarnamukhi — irrigate more than 1,000 acres, only five have head-sluices (all put up in the last fifteen years) and not one of the whole number has a masonry dam. They are all native works, and their heads are in many cases badly placed, their alignments too winding, their sections indifferent, and the provision for cross-drainage insufficient. None the less they do their work fairly well and' irrigate, in this district, 8,200 acres of Government land besides 16,100 acres belonging to the Bobbili and Siripuram zamindaris. They chiefly water the lower part of the taluk, in the basin of the river, while the higher ground nearer the hills is supplied only by small tanks or from precarious hill streams.
To improve the conditions in the portion of this latter area lying to the west of Pálkonda town, a scheme called the Nágávali project has recently been sanctioned and is now in course of execution. This consists in constructing a bridge, fitted with nine rising iron shutters each 40 feet long, across the Nágávali at Tótapalli, about six miles east of Párvatípur, where the river bed is 420 feet wide and the maximum flood discharge 17 feet deep, and taking a main channel thence along the left bank of the river to near Pálkonda, a distance of 21 miles. As the bridge will be used to carry the Párvatípur-Pálkonda traffic,which is now frequently interrupted for long periods by freshes, and perhaps also the Párvatípur-Gunupur road later on, the District Board have contributed Rs. 30,000 towards the cost of the scheme. The project will command 78 square miles of country, of which it is proposed to irrigate 25,000 acres of ryotwari and minor inam land and 6,200 acres of zamindari and whole inam. The scheme is estimated to oost Rs. 10,82,000 and to give a return of 8 per cent, on the total capital outlay.
This chapter may conclude with a few words summarizing the effect which the conditions sketched in it and elsewhere in this volume have upon the economic condition of the class which so greatly preponderates in Vizagapatam, namely, the smaller agriculturists. The question is rendered more than usually difficult owing to the absence of agricultural statistics for more than nine-tenths of the area of the district.
It will be seen in Chapter VI below that arts, industries and manufactures are scarce, and consequently afford the people few alternative occupations when the seasons are unfavourable; but Chapter VIII shows that the rainfall is usually good except along the sea-board; that when it is not, emigration to Rangoon and Gódávari is the customary safety-valve; and that the ample communications with Burma, the deltas of the Gódávari and Kistna, and the grain-growing tracts in Jeypore suffice to prevent prices rising to excessive heights.
Were it otherwise the people would be poorer than they are,for zamindari tenure, without admitted occupancy right in the land, does not make for careful cultivation or the improvement of the soil. Doubtless statistics would show that the number of small holders of land is less in zamindari than in ryotwari land,but part of the reason for this lies in the fact that the zamindars do not encourage the pauper cultivator, preferring to let their land to men of substance. In none of the estates have the ryots an acknowledged fixity of tenure except in Vizianagram, where a re-settlement was lately carried out when the property was under Government management and the occupancy right of those ryots who agreed to the new rates was admitted. The assessments are not constantly or avariciously raised, but at irregular intervals they are enhanced by a few pies in the rupee to meet the extensien of cultivation and the general rise in prices which has occurred, and when a man dies his patta is re-granted to his heirs (these documents are seldom renewed annually, as in the south)at a somewhat enhanced rate. But the chances of the occurrence of one or other of these events, or of a rival ryot applying (in accordance with a local custom which is well established) for an exchange of holdings with his neighbour on the ground that the latter's land is under-assessed, are sufficient to check the sinking of capital in improvements. Some of the zamindari pattas moreover contain ungenerous terms (such as a stipulation that no trees shall be felled and none planted without permission) and the custom of dividing the actual produce of wet lands (assessment on dry land is generally paid in money) between the zamindar and the tenant gives the former's officials chances of exacting perquisites. The general insignificance of the irrigation works, and the refusal of any remission in bad seasons, moreover renders wet cultivation less profitable than it might be, and forces the ryot to carry out repairs to irrigation works which in ryotwari tracts he would calmly leave to Government to effect. There is astonishingly little litigation between landlord and tenant under the tenancy law (Act VIII of 1865) and their relations are usually friendly enough; but the result of the system seems to be that the zammdari ryots in the plains of Vizagapatam are, as a body, much less prosperous than their fellows in southern ryotwari districts of equal fertility. It will be seen from p. 60 that thousands of them have emigrated to Gódávari, and from p. 194 that the receipts from income-tax and the sale of stamps are extremely small in the district; compared with the south, the houses are mean, the standard of comfort is low, and evidences of wealth in the shape of good clothes and gold jewellery among the women are strikingly slender. Outside the bigger towns, the women of the money-lending Kómatis (Baniyans, as they are called locally) are almost the only ones who wear gold ornaments of value. The Kómatis, the Pattu Sáles in some parts, and the Márvaris in the large towns do nearly all the money-lending, and the rates they charge are not reduced in the same manner as further south by the competition of members of the agricultural castes or the benefits of chit associations or nidhis.
In the Agency, matters are on rather different ground. The system under which the Jeypore estate is administered is referred to in the account of it on p. 271 below and is fairly representative of the methods in the smaller properties. Contact with the outer world and the action of the Government officers who managed the estate during the recent minority have swept away many of the oppressive and inconvenient dues and assessments which used to be levied there, so that the taxes on houses, hearths, marriages and trades, which were in force as late as 1868,are things of the past, and the land assessments no longer include contributions of oil, skins, honey and so forth. Land is fertile and plentiful, firing is cheap, the rainfall is unfailing, the market for produce has been immensely widened by new roads, the ryot has usually a lenient and fixed assessment which is protected from violent enhancement by the fear of his decamping to rival estates, suits under the tenancy law are almost unknown, and if only ryotwari tenure could replace the mustájari (renting) system the people would have little to complain of. In the smaller estates things are sometimes managed differently. Tho pattas in Mádgole formally stipulate that the ryot shall send the zamindar the haunch of every deer shot and provide for miscellaneous payments of all kinds, and many of the cultivators of Páchipenta were recently driven to emigrate to Jeypore land because their plough and hoe taxes had been more than doubled arbitrarily. But on the whole the hill ryot is a cheery and well-nourished individual who can afford to dress his womenkind in bright cloths and load them with brass ornaments, keeps up to the local standard of comfort without undue effort, and every spring takes a clear month's holiday enlivened by songs, dances, beats for game, unlimited strong drink, and deep draughts of other pleasures of the flesh.
Two flies in this amber are the Vetti, or compulsory service,and the Sondi, the liquor-seller and money-lender. Vetti service is now becoming less universal, but while the Jeypore estate was under management Mr. H. D. Taylor reported that though this unpaid labour was really only demandable by custom by the Mahárája himself (and that too on payment of daily batta) yet he ámíns and lower revenue officials and the mustájars and others had come to exact it for the cultivation of their private land and did not even pay the labourer his batta.
The Sondis are a more serious evil. They are gradually getting much of the best land into their hands and many of the guileless hill ryots into their power. Mr. Taylor stated in 1892 that —
'The rate of interest on loans extorted by these Sondis is 100 per cent., and if this is not cleared off in the first year, compound interest at 100 per cent, is charged on the balance. The result is that in many instances the cultivators are unable to pay in cash or kind and become the gótis or serfs of the sowcare, for whom they have to work in return for mere batta, whilst the latter take care to manipulate their accounts in such a manner that the debt is never paid off. A remarkable instance of this tyranny was brought to my notice a few days since: a ryot some fifty years back borrowed Rs. 20: he paid back Ks. 50 at intervals and worked for the whole of his life and died in harness: for the same debt the sowcar claimed the services of his son, and he too died in boadage leaving two small sons aged 13 and 9, whose services were also claimed for an alleged arrear of Rs. 30 on a debt of Rs.20, borrowed 50 years back, for which Rs. 50 in cash had been repaid in addition to the perpetual labour of a man for a similar period.' This custom, of góti is firmly established, and in a recent case an elder brother claimed to be able to pledge for his own debts the services of his younger brother and even those of the latter's wife. Debts due by persons of respectability are often collected by the Sondis by an exasperating method which has led to at least one case of homicide. They send Ghásis, who are one of the lowest of all castes and contact with whom is utter defilement entailing severe caste penalties, to haunt the house of the debtor who will not pay, insult and annoy him and his family, and threaten to drag him forcibly before the Sondi.