VIZAGAPATAM
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
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