LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT.
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
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