SIMPLISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF TANKS IN POLICY AND TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY

4.1 I

Understanding tank conflicts necessitates understanding the land and technology policies pertaining to tanks. This chapter aims to show how the tank as a technology is visualized in law and policy that led to different treatment between tanks in different property regimes and sizes. Since the days of the colonial rule, policies related to water in general, and tanks in particular originated from the land revenue policies. The laws that governed them are mostly the compartmentalized executive instructions issued at various points in time by the land revenue officials. Similarly, the technology policies affecting tanks are also made by the same Revenue Department and the Board of Revenue without paying attention to the interconnected aspects of tanks and their components- most importantly the supply channels. This chapter argues that (i) the land settlement policies did not comprehend the tanks as a technology, and created a property regime solely aimed at maximizing the land revenue; (ii) the technical documentation about the tanks detailing their specifications remained inadequate and incomplete since the colonial takeover, and no concerted efforts made to prepare and document them for the betterment of tanks; (iii) in tune with these land policies the tank development policies differentiated between larger and smaller tanks; government and private tanks; and zamindari and ryotwari tanks.

4.2 T

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Strachey, a long time officer of the colonial government wrote the British policy in India is, “to encourage the growth of private property in land….(though) former governments hardly recognized the existence of such property (cited in Khaldun (2007, 11))”. Madras Permanent Settlement Regulation XXV of 1802 legally commenced the process of establishing property rights over land by settling lands

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in the present day Tamil Nadu. The ideological underpinnings of creating private property rights over land through the land settlements under the British rule is debated by historians in great length. Eric Stokes believes it is the English Whig notions of recognising private property as the basic principle of government (Stokes 1982); and Ranajit Guha believes it is the French physiocratic notions of creating a mercantilist capitalist class in India (Guha 1963). However, there is a general agreement exist among scholars that settlements came into place to promote private property systems in land.

Using this law, different land settlements were held throughout the nineteenth century. A detailed discussion of the origin of settlements and the bureaucracy that spearheaded in ryotwari areas are discussed in chapter 5. Though this regulation of 1802, brought the land settlement process in the presidency, ryotwari settlements that covered most of the Madras presidency areas did not have a specific statute but done solely through executive instructions of revenue officers. However, this regulation is cited as the origin of the settlement process in Madras Presidency. After the transfer of power in 1947, all types of settlements were converted into ryotwari settlements wherein the government deals with landholders directly without intermediaries.

Irrespective of the nature of settlements the law treated tanks (constituting parts of waterspread or the bed, bunds, channels and rivers) as tax free lands¹. In 1904, in an entirely unrelated dispute between a householder and the government about using a piece of government land, the Madras High Court held penal levies to be illegal, and shall be questioned by a civil court², because the land belonged

1 Until 1905, the government ownership on the tank beds in ryotwaris were not defined clearly, and many individuals used these lands for cultivation subject to some conditions and levies. The situation was the same in zamindari settlements as well and whoever occupied tanks (beds and bunds for cultivation) were called occupancy right holders and such pieces of land was called ryoti land. A detailed discussion on the legal aspects of this is discussed in chapter 5.

2 Madathapu Ramaya v The Secretary of State,[1904] ILR 27 (Mad) 386

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to government for the purpose of revenue collections alone. The government thus introduced the Madras Land Encroachment Act 1905 to declare the government ownership over different types of lands including tanks.³ Since then, tanks have remained as government property. However, this law does not declare every part of the tank as government property. It covered only those areas that are marked as tank in the land survey registers. The registers do not mark every part of the tank as tank lands. For example, many channels connecting tanks running at a distance from a particular tank may be given to private holders.

Similarly, parts of tank beds were given away for cultivation on a temporary or permanent basis. It all meant that some parts of the tank remained government property and others private. The settlement thereby did not preserve every component of tank as it should have been. The channels and tank beds became the first victim of this policy. In order to show the effect of such a practice an illustration is provided in Figure 4.1. This plan of Nilaiyur tank would show how ownership in tanks is defined and established. Nilaiyur tank is a large historic tank with over 400 acres of irrigation lying close to Madurai city. It is visible that some parts in the middle of the tank bed belonged to private property and the rest as government property. When the tank gets full, most of this private land will be submerged including the cultivated lands and some buildings in the middle of water.

Like Nilaiyur, there are hundreds of tanks wherein large parts of waterspread areas, foreshores are held in private while the rest of the tank is a government property. A discussion about why and how such private ownership came into is discussed in chapter 5 and 6. Such private land holders came into existence because of the land settlement policy and law. The private land holders may do

3 Government property means all public roads, streets, lanes and paths, bridges, ditches, dykes and fences, on or beside the same, the bed of the sea and of harbours and creeks below high water mark, and of rivers, streams, nalas, lakes and tanks and all canals and water courses and all standing and flowing water and all lands situated are the property of the Government including Railway lands and land in Port limits. (Madras Land Encroachment Act 1905, s.2(1))

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things that may even be detrimental to the existence of a tank. Those who hold lands lawfully as in the case of Nilaiyur cannot be prevented from doing what they want to. The field work visits have

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shown, for almost every tank visited, that the tank bed has to some extent been cultivated or built on with habitations. This phenomena shall be found in many cities and villages. ‘Lake area’ or ‘Lake view’ in many cities of Tamil Nadu are euphemisms that they were once tank beds converted into housing areas. At times, householders in these areas want the tank to be empty because it inundates their dwellings. Thus the property definition in law did not take care of the integrity of the tank as a whole when the various land settlements offered tank beds and channels to private land holders. Often, this situation leads to conflicts between the tank water users and the users of the tank bed and channels for cultivation and housing etc., The land holders in the tank beds and channels lawfully claim they were duly settled but the water users may contest them as abusers damaging the tanks.

To understand this phenomenon we shall refer to a historic tank in north Tamil Nadu. Sivasubramaniyan (1995) found that Kaverippakkam tank in Palar basin had its ayacut of 2559 ha (during the first land settlement of 1882) reduced to 2341 ha during the third land settlement (held in 1983). He attributed the reduction of 218 ha to the loss of a substantial part of the water spread area to the occupiers in the intervening 101 years. He observed tensions between the foreshore land holders and the ayacutdars still exist even after such a long time since the first land settlements. In the same way, in Ramanathapuram district, a study of analyzing the actual tank waterspread as measured by engineering memoirs and the revenue records showed the actual tank bed is higher by 40 % in all tanks. It is reasonable to assume that this much area of the tank beds are given away as private lands over the years even though water stagnates in them in every season (Seenivasan, et. al 1999).

Numerous court cases dealt about fixing the ‘boundaries of the tank’ and in many such cases, the full tank levels (FTL) of tanks were altered in order to suit the land settlement and ensure the extent of private lands, thereby reducing the area of

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tank beds⁴. Therefore, today it is common to notice the difference between the land marked as water spread (tank bed) in land revenue records and the actual area under water (computed by the engineering memoirs). This results in continued tensions between the tank bed farmers who think that ‘their own land’

is being ‘submerged’ and others think their tank is ‘encroached’ or abused.

To cite how far such conflicts would go on in the courts an example is given here.

In a dispute related to an ancient tank named Kadamba tank in Tirunelveli district, the foreshore cultivators and the ayacutdars went on fighting a court case to define the boundary of a tank for over sixty years before it was settled by the High Court⁵. The High Court in its order settled what the Full Tank Line of the tank? by looking at the papers (property right documents such as patta and other settlement records issued by Revenue Department). Technically, the FTL should have been the boundary line in the rear side of any tank, and hence defines the area of the tank bed. Thus the records created by the land settlements in the preceding decades became sacrosanct and defined the several centuries old tank.

It is appropriate to conclude that the land settlement regulations and the laws (dealing with encroachment of government properties) in spirit and practice did not recognize the tanks as a technical system. Rather tanks are assumed as another piece of land that shall be given away for cultivation without bothering the performance and survival of the tank. As a result, a set of conflicts between those who occupy the beds and those who use the tank for water continues forever. It is also clear that the law, (especially the revenue law that created papers) did not understand the meaning of tank structures when it created them, and the courts did not need to look at any technical issues involved but to look only for what is available in paper. Further discussions about the importance and

4 Refer to Ramasamy Naicker and others v Sangu Reddiyar (unreported) discussed in chapter 9.

5 T.K. Nallamuthu Pillai. v R.K. Thirumalai Aiyangar, [1942] 1 MLJ 49

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relevance of records in resolving tank conflicts that come to Courts are provided in chapter 9.

4.3 I

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4.3.1 TANK MEMOIRS

It is not that this phenomenon of giving away tank beds as private holdings is unknown during the colonial times. There were also systematic efforts to understand tank engineering in some detail to redevelop them. However these attempts were half hearted and could not be completed as visualized. Tank surveys initially commenced in the 1850s in tank irrigated areas like Madurai, and by 1883 there were separate Engineering Circles within the Public Works Department (PWD) called Tank Restoration Survey (TRS). The TRS as a scheme

“provided for the compilation of a very complete memoir of each tank, giving the standard to be maintained in future (Morgan 2004, 292) ”. TRS thus recorded, codified and suggested standards for tanks in the name of Tank Memoirs. The memoir writing circles comprised of accounts of engineers who visited tanks, channels, and anicuts and enumerated technical details and prepared and placed them on detailed maps. It was a gigantic task to assess and prepare records for over 100,000 tanks spread in a geographic area identified as ‘area with scope’, i-e tank-fed cultivated area of 102,500 sq.miles within the Madras Presidency.

It involved tedious work under the sun and rain for days by engineers set on foot.

Nearly all tanks and their parts were measured. Exact geographical coordinates of sluices and weirs were fixed with reference to the Mean Sea Levels (MSL). This technical data has around 40 specifications for a small tank and many more for larger ones. It included the condition, area and quantity of runoff from the tank catchment; condition, areal extent, quantity of water stored, maximum and minimum depths of water within the tank; physical conditions of the tank at the time of surveying; scope for further improvement and required specifications to

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be followed for the future; the MSL of sluices, bunds, weirs, and bottom of tanks and important channels⁶.

The references to the datum (or benchmark for fixing any MSL) are fixed locally (usually on the temple sanctums or foundations that are usually unchanged) in order to provide a standard that should always be maintained in all tanks. They were even analyzed up to the levels of river basins and published with extraordinary details and printed on colourful maps. Tank intensive districts in south India such as most of Madura and parts of Coimbatore lying in Vaigai and Amaravathy (Cauvery) basins had their Tank memoirs published with colour maps as early as 1887 (PWD 1887, 66). By 1931, 92 % of all tank-fed areas (constituting 94,600 sq.miles) within Madras Presidency was surveyed and had their memoirs printed (PWD 1931). Titbits based on these memoir data was known around the world and the importance of such technical documentation were realized. Deakin, the future Prime minister of Victoria, Australia, in his study of Irrigated India, said,

“A calculation has been in circulation for some years, in which it is estimated that, if the embankments constructed with this end within the Presidency, were added together, they would make a wall of earth six feet high, one and a half times round the globe (Cotton 1900, 66)”. The quest for scientifically recording the existing tanks and scope of their future was planned through these exercises.

Though the memoirs preparation is a great effort to record and codify every tank, there were some serious omissions too. The memoirs did not record the details of channels thereby leaving a critical element altogether to the land revenue authorities and their documents. The memoirs only specified from where the water comes in and drains out without any specific measurement of channels and their dimensions. This again leads to another complex issue of how to arrive at what are the correct and original dimensions for a supply channel even when

6 TRS memoirs for several basins including Vaigai, Gundar, and Vaippar were referred for this research. Though there are some variations in the style of writing between those published in British times and after, they all attempt to follow the same set of procedure to describe every component of a tank.

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memoirs are available for tanks. In case, if the dimensions go beyond the existing government owned land space, the private holder may not allow the retrieval of the channel and its re-development. In several cases the entire or parts of channel run in private lands and the land holders object to the tank users to enter into the land and clean it regularly. Some of the court cases reported in the later chapters provide details on this issue. Several observations are made about this phenomena in the extensively studied participatory tank rehabilitation projects undertaken by the Anna University (CWR 1992; CWR and Ford Foundation 2001;

Sakthivadivel and Shanmugham 1988).

Today, even when projects really intend to develop tank channels, there are many difficulties in arriving at the correct specifications and a re-design for the supply channel. Several compromises have been made on the ground to respect the legal position of the owner of the adjoining land who always objects that such a project that is detrimental to his/her property. A case study of re-developing a supply channel named Pirandodi taking off from Thirumanimuthar river in Madurai shows many difficulties in redesigning them. The channel was 6 m in width for a length of 1.75 km as per Tank memoirs published in 1913. However, in 1997, in land revenue records, it decreased to less than 2.5 m at its origin and 1 m at the end. Several adjoining land holders have got the tank channels between 1913 and 1997. Redesigning the channel to convey the required flow to the downstream tanks has to be done with great difficulties and compromises with the private land holders on the channel (Shanmugham and Kanagavalli 2000). Fearing these

‘unwanted’ complications in the tank development work the government departments and their contractors hardly do any redevelopment of channels. It is rare to find any government sponsored tank development work to include supply channels in their estimate for rehabilitation works.

4.3.2 THE STATUS OF MEMOIRS

After, nearly a century since its inception, in the 1980s, the last of the two functioning TRS units in Tamil Nadu (Villupuram and Sivagangai) was wound up.

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Over time, within the increasingly cash rich Public Works Department (PWD), these engineering circles have received small funds for their work and closed once for all. The basic research work in counting and surveying the tanks involved very small budgets and acquired a sort of undesirability within the PWD that deals with millions in development works. When they were wound up, these engineering circles were preparing the second or third round of tank assessments and never got the volumes completed and published⁷.

With the closure of these units in the PWD of Tamil Nadu, no up-to-date information or a database is presently available. Thus the job remains half done.

Availing those printed memoirs is again very difficult and may take years of correspondence with the department that still hold some of them⁸. The manuscripts remain rotting in the departmental record rooms and need to be discovered in bits and pieces⁹. On the whole, the understanding of tanks and its

7 I visited the office of the Assistant Executive Engineer of PWD office at Virudhunagar in July 2010 for this research and found them having typed manuscripts of some parts of the memoirs. The officer regretted their department is yet to print and supply these basic documents many years after the TRS memoir circles were closed down.

8 For DHAN Foundation, an Indian nongovernment organisation involved in tank development works it took nearly three years of correspondence and personal meetings to get hold of a few sections of printed memoirs for Gundar basin.

Initially not many staff knew where it is kept; when it was accidentally found in a heap in a old record room none knew whether it should be given to researchers;

when decided by the local office to give for ‘government sponsored research’ the department could not fix a price since it was not priced; and finally the top government secretary intervened to provide this to outside agencies. I have involved and understood the status of keeping such scientific records within the government.

9 The status of these engineering circles was similar or even worse in other tank

9 The status of these engineering circles was similar or even worse in other tank