Vizagapatam/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV.
LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT.
THE LOCAL BOARDS — The Unions — Finances of the boards. THE FOUR MUNICIPALITIES — Anakápalle municipality — Bimlipatam municipality — Vizianagram municipality — Improvements effected by it — Water-supply and drainage — Vizagapatam municipality — Its many undertakings — The water-works.
THE district contains four municipalities; namely, those at Anakápalle, Bimlipatam, Vizagapatam and Vizianagram: and certain portions of the Agency (namely, the part of the Golgonda hills above the Gháts, the Pálkonda hills and the Savara and Kuttiya Khond country in the Gunupur and Bissamkatak taluks) are excluded from the operation of the Local Boards Act. Elsewhere, local affairs are managed by the District Boards of Vizagapatam and Koraput and the four taluk boards working under the former. The Koraput District Board has jurisdiction over all the Jeypore zamindari except the portions of it which lie in the taluks of Párvatípur, Ráyagada, Bissamkatak and Gunupur, and manages matters therein without the intervention of any taluk boards. It began work only on the 1st April 1905, but proposals to extend the Local Boards Act to parts at least of the Agency, so as to compel them to contribute something towards the large and increasing expenditure on local needs which is annually incurred with in them, have been made at intervals ever since 1875, The Vizagapatam District Board controls affairs in the rest of the district except the municipalities and the excluded areas already mentioned. The charges of the four taluk boards under it — those of Narasapatam, Párvatípur, Vizagapatam and Vizianagram — correspond (excepting, again, these excluded areas) with the tracts comprised in the revenue divisions of these names already set out on p. 2.
The seventeen large villages noted in the margin have been constituted unions. As elsewhere, the chief item in their income is the house-tax, which is levied at half rates in Gunupur and Jeypore, but on the maximum scale else-where. The average
| Narasapatam taluk board | Vizagapatam taluk board |
| Chódavaram | Srungavarapukóta |
| Kasimkóta | Jámí |
| Mádgole | Vizianagram taluk board |
| Narasapatam | Chípurupalle |
| Yellamanchili | Gajapatinagaram |
| Párvatípur taluk board | Pálkonda |
| Bobbili | Pondúru |
| Gunupur | Rázám |
| Párvatípur | Koraput district board. |
| Sálúr | Jeypore |
The separate Appendix to this volume gives figures of the receipts and expenditure of the Vizagapatam District Board and the taluk boards subordinate thereto. As usual, the land-cess, which is collected at the rate of one anna in the rupee of the land assessment, is the chief source of income. It is followed by the receipts from tolls, which are collected at fourteen gates at half the maximum rates. The chief heads of expenditure, as usual, are the upkeep of the roads and of the medical and educational institutions. These have already been referred to in Chapters VII, IX and X, respectively.
Besides the four towns already mentioned, Pálkonda was also once constituted a municipality. This was effected in 1869, at the instance of the renters of the taluk, Messrs. Arbuthnot & Co. The next year a squabble occurred as to who should be vice-president, and the council resigned in a body. Three years later, the Collector reported that the secretary was incapable, that none of the inhabitants took the slightest interest in the municipality or desired its continuance, and that its funds were derived from an illegitimate source and were improperly spent. Government accordingly abolished the institution. Proposals to turn Bobbili and Párvatípur into municipalities have been twice (in 1884 and 1902) discussed and twice rejected.
Anakápalle was constituted a municipal town in 1877 at the suggestion of the Collector. In December 1878 the same officer wrote to Government saying that a cyclone and flood had swept away three-quarters of the houses (and consequently, three parts of the council's income) and suggesting that the municipality should be abolished accordingly. Government, however, refused to do so, urging that times of calamity were just the occasions when councils could be of use. The council was given the power of electing its own chairman in 1885, but not until 1897 was it allowed the privilege of electing a proportion (four) of its thirteen councilors. The town is built in a cramped site among low-lying paddy-fields and is consequently difficult to keep clean, and the municipal income is small. The council has consequently effected little beyond the usual routine duties. It has constructed itself an office from borrowed money; started a small sewage farm; and established, with financial profit, a suburb to the north-west of the town (called Woodpéta after the then Divisional Officer) which affords some relief to the overcrowding which exists. Bimlipatam has a much longer experience of local self- government, having established in 1861 a voluntary association, as it was termed, under Act XXVI of 1850, an enactment which permitted towns to voluntarily- tax themselves for their own improvement and provided for the free grant by Government of a sum equal to the amount so raised. This association worked undisputed good. Its income amounted to about Rs. 4,000 and was mainly derived from a small tax on carts entering the town.The Government contribution brought the receipts to about Rs. 8,000.
In 1866 the association was replaced by a council established under the Towns Improvement Act of the preceding year, and this has since continued in existence under the successive municipal Acts which have since been passed. In the forty years since it originated, there have been but four changes among its chairmen; and this fact and the natural advantages of the place in the way of water-supply and drainage — it is situated on the side of a hill facing the sea and contains numerous good wells-have resulted in the town becoming clean and tidy beyond the normal. Four of the twelve councillors have been elected since 1900 and since 1885 the chairman has been chosen by the council.
In Vizianagram a municipal association was founded at about the same time as in Bimlipatam. The average receipts (derived principally from a cart-tax) were about Rs. 450, and Government contributed an equal amount. In November 1866 a council was established under the Towns Improvement Act. In 1888 the rate-payers were permitted to elect twelve out of the sixteen councillors and the council chooses its own chairman. Matters in the cantonment, which has now recently ceased to exist, were separately managed by the military authorities.
Public improvements in Vizianagram have been due chiefly to the Rája and his predecessors and the members of their family, and the municipal council has effected little of note. The former have given the town the college, Sanskrit school, hospital and gosha hospital referred to in Chapters X and IX respectively,and also the large series of market stalls built in 1876 at a cost of half a lakh and known as the Prince of Wales ' Market in commemoration of the present King-Emperor's visit to India in 1875.
Besides carrying on the usual routine duties, the municipality built, in 1885, the clock-tower in the bazaar-street, an octagonal building 68 feet high which cost, with its clock, Rs. 6,400; erected its present office, at a cost of Rs. 7,500, in 1904; and maintains a dispensary in a rented building', a small sewage farm and a Victoria Jubilee Park. The last was brought into being chiefly by the enterprise o£ Rai Bahádur P. Jagannátha Rázu, Díwán to the then Mahárája and chairman of the council for some thirty years. In 1887 about 50 acres of land in the town (which were then part swamp, part paddy-fields and part general rubbish heap) were obtained from the Mahárája in exchange for other land elsewhere and converted into a garden under expert advice at a cost of Ks. 8,000. It lies in the centre of the town, is much resorted to, and is neatly kept up; and thus is in great contrast to the neglected wastes usually associated with the name Jubilee Park.
The town has neither a regular water-supply nor any proper drainage. Water is obtained from wells and tanks, the principal of the latter being the Ayyakonéru and Buchanna's tank. The chief of such drains as there are discharge into the Pedda Cheruvu, the agricultural tank which (see p. 336) lies between the town and the cantonment. About 1888 the late Mahárája employed an engineer from England, Mr. Beckett, to draw up a water-supply scheme, but this gentleman went off with all the plans of the project he elaborated and no particulars of it survive except that it contemplated bringing water nearly 20 miles from the Mentáda river and was estimated to cost live lakhs. In 1897 two other suggestions were examined. Mr. Willock proposed to obtain a supply from the river at Nellimarla, while Dr. King favoured a scheme depending on a perennial stream called the Ottaigedda. The latter involved digging a trench 1,700 feet in length parallel to, and about 100 yards distant from, the gedda at a point about a mile and a half from the town; pumping the water so obtained to a reservoir on an adjoining hill and thence supplying the town by gravitation. The cost was put at Rs. 2.82 lakhs, and as the late Mahárája had expressed his willingness to contribute 1½ lakhs it was considered to be within the means of the town and ordered to lie over until the present Rája should attain his majority in August 1904. No further steps have yet been taken.
In 1888 a drainage scheme, estimated to cost Rs. 73,000, was drawn up by a Mr. Gauge of Calcutta; but it did not find acceptance locally, and in any case the water-supply will take precedence of it.
Vizagapatam began its career of self-government as early as 1858 by starting the most successful of the few municipal associations which were founded in this Presidency under the Act of 1850 already mentioned. This body derived its income chiefly from a tax on houses and carts and from ferry fees; and these eventually brought in as much as Rs. 10,500 a year, to which Government added a contribution of an equal amount. The association was nothing if not ambitious, and in its very first year of office it turned its attention to the widening and lighting of the streets, the establishment of markets, and even to schemes of drainage and water-supply. Its actual achievements included a commodious Municipal Hall' with which were connected a library, reading room and a young men's literary institution.'It continually emphasized the purely voluntary nature of the payments made to it, and the town obtained in consequence much credit for its public spirit; but the reports add naively that people who did not pay the house-tax were warned that they would be left to clean their own premises and the street in front thereof, and that they were liable to fine by the police if this duty was neglected. In 1863 a municipal council under the Act of 1865 was constituted. The council now chooses its own chairman, and three-fourths of its members are elected by the rate-payers. The incidence of taxation (excluding tolls) per head of the population is twice as heavy as in any other municipality in the district, and much above the average for the whole Presidency.
The council has conferred many permanent benefits upon the town. It subscribed half the cost of the pontoon bridge which (see p. 135) for many years spanned the backwater; it now manages the Turner Chattram and the Bobbili Town Hall referred to on pp. 144 and 331; in 1899 it removed the fishermen's village which formerly occupied the site of this latter and the surrounding land, first across the backwater at a cost of Rs.36,000, and then, when the fishermen began dying there with rapidity, to another part of the town; it has started two profitable sewage farms, one near Ross Hill and the other just west of the main bazaar street on land reclaimed gradually from the swamp there by operations began as far back as 1872; it has made the beach road next the sea between Waltair and Vizagapatam, which was begun as long ago as 1864-65 and was carried on from Scandal Point to the Judge's bungalow at a cost of Rs 15,000 by the Mahárája of Vizianagram in 1896; with Rs. 10,000 contributed by Lady Gajapati Rao it has recently cleared of prickly-pear the old native infantry lines and driven a road from the Maháránipéta so formed to the beach road; with Rs. 15,000 presented by the Rája of Kurupám it Las purchased a site for an 'Edward VII Coronation Market;' and lastly it has provided the town with a proper water-supply.
This supply depends upon the perennial stream known as the Hanumanta Vanka, which rises in the hills to the west of the town not far from the Simháchalam temple and flows down a deep valley about five miles long into Lawson's Bay. The stream has been dammed up to form a reservoir with a catchment area of six square miles and a capacity of 25 million cubic feet, and from this the water is led 5½ miles through a ten-inch iron main to a service reservoir near the jail, whence it is distributed in the usual way to stand-pipes. The scheme does not command Waltair, which gets its water from wells. The works cost 4½ lakhs, of which Government granted one half and lent the other on the terms then usual, were carried out by the Public Works department, and were handed over to the council in May 1903.