relief-works. Matters were made worse by the fact that, acting on a general belief (encouraged by the astrologers) that three whole years of famine were impending, the sowcars refused to give the hill people the usual advances on the security of their crops upon which they generally subsist in the interval between sowing and harvest.
Relief-works were opened, but, except in Bhadráchalam, the hill men absolutely refused to come to them. In Pólavaram they preferred to help themselves in their own lawless manner by plundering their richer neighbours. Collecting in gangs, they looted no less than 39 villages in seven days; and, as the local police were afraid to act, order was not restored till the District Superintendent of Police arrived with the Reserve, and marched a number of the rioters off to prison. The villagers had not resisted the robbers, so no blood had been spilt, but it was estimated that property worth Rs. 10,000 had been stolen during these riots. Meanwhile in Bhadráchalam works were opened in May 1897 and a fair number of Kóyas attended them.
Gratuitous relief was given on a large scale in this taluk, but to a less extent in the rest of the Agency where either the distress was not so acute, or the hill men had helped themselves by robbery. In Bhadráchalam nearly Rs. 12,000 were distributed in this way, and nearly Rs. 17,000 were spent from charitable funds when the distress was at an end in buying seed-grain, cattle, etc. and selling them at low rates to the impoverished people to enable them to start cultivating again.
It was not in the Agency alone that the pinch of these years was felt. Test works had to be opened in Rajahmundry and Cocanada taluks and in Ellore, then a part of this district; and nearly Rs. 7,000 were spent on works in these three areas. A little gratuitous relief was also given in Rajahmundry, and a poor-house was established at Cocanada.
Inundations of the coast by the sea occurred fairly frequently in former times, and Mr. Topping, the astronomer, when making enquiries about them in 1789, found that they were so well known as to have a definite name, being called uppena 1.[1]
The earliest of which any record survives occurred in December about the year 1706, but all that is known of it is derived from the oral testimony of a very old man some eighty-three years later. The wind had been blowing very hard from the east for two days and the sea burst upon the
- ↑ 1 Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, No. XIX (Madras, 1855), 23.
