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The engineer obsessed with water
HIS PEERS called him "a man of one idea", "something of a fanatic" and "hare-brained". Yet, in his day, he greened the Madras Presidency and was revered as a karmayogi by the farmers in the hinterland of the Kaveri and Godavari deltas. He would have been in the Krishna region too if only he had stayed on in India to complete what he had planned. It may be fashionable today to decry the work of men like Arthur Cotton as "symbols of imperial control" and "tools for proselytising, through exemplifying Christian virtues", but the fact remains that they left a legacy that survived for well over a 100 years and created granaries where the grain godowns were mere memories long before their arrival. Cotton's bicentenary, falling on May 15, is, however, likely to be remembered by few today.
What this founder of the modern school of Indian hydraulic engineering, opposed all the way by the governments in India and Britain, also left behind was a dream. He was the first to propose the linking of the rivers of India. He envisioned not only bringing the waters of the Indus and the Brahmaputra to the Kaveri but he also forcefully argued that a network of navigable canals would be of greater cost benefit to India than the railways. More than 15 years after he had retired to England on grounds of ill-health, Sir Arthur Cotton, who was knighted in 1876, accused the India office of considering water "as a proscribed word" and charged that "the sole cause of famine is the refusal to execute the works that will give us the use of the water that is at our disposal". Two years later, in 1878, he suggested a scheme that would give "prosperity twice over", providing both navigational as well as irrigation facilities, if "a navigable line 4000 miles long from Karachi via Cawnpore, Calcutta and Cuttack to Bhatkal, Mangalore and Madras" was developed. He wrote forcefully to the Secretary of State for India, "... the future of India's millions depends greatly upon whether money is still expended upon Railways to cost £9000 a mile and carry thirty thousand at one penny or upon canals to cost from £2000 to £8000 and carry two or three million tons at one twentieth of a penny, and whether districts are to be put into the State of Tanjore, Kistna or Godavari or left... like Orissa, Behar and Central India... ".
It was to be about 70 years later that another engineer with a dream, Captain Dinshaw J. Dastur, revived the idea for a national canal grid and presented it to Jawaharlal Nehru through the good offices of Homi Bhabha. The pains of Independence led to the scheme being pigeonholed till the Morarji Desai Government urged the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation to look at it. But when the Desai Government fell, back the `Garland Scheme' went into the pigeonholes. Now, the Vajpayee Government is beginning to look at these and other schemes, but is committed to linking the rivers of India through a network of canals.
Shortly before Cotton left Madras in 1860, constant ill-health cutting short his career, Governor Charles Trevelyan noted, "If we have done our duty at least to this part of India, and have founded a system which will be a source of strength and wealth... it is due to one master mind which, with admirable industry and perseverance, in spite of every discouragement, has worked out this great result... For this first creation of genius we are indebted to him alone. Colonel Cotton's name will be venerated by millions yet unborn... "
Cotton's legacies include the Upper and Lower Coleroon Anicuts he built in the 1830s, drawing inspiration from the Grand Anicut of the Cholas which he also restored, and the great Dowleshwaram Anicut, 12 feet high and 7,365 feet long across the Godavari he built in the 1840s with a network of navigable canals leading from it.
The only prototype for any of this work anywhere in the world was the Grand Anicut. That and the faith this Bible-toting engineer had in God's helping hand inspired him to create engineering marvels that still provide livelihoods to millions 150 years later. But will even the Irrigation Departments of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh celebrate his contributions this week?
S. MUTHIAH
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