VIZAGAPATAM.
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
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