“When a farmer tills his land in East Godavari district or receives the money for his produce, he thinks about only one man: Sir Arthur Cotton.”

Sir Arthur Thomas Cotton (1803-1899)

General and irrigation engineer; Cotton obtained a commission in the Madras Engineers in 1819 and first became involved in the extension and improvement of the irrigation systems in Southern India in 1828. These works became Cotton’s lifelong mission. Through schemes in which he was directly involved, and through founding an Indian school of hydraulic engineering, Cotton’s work is calculated to have saved the lives of countless millions from famine.

This is possibly the reason behind the gret reverence with which he is held even after a century in the villages of East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh (India). This despite the fact that he was British.

Cottonreddypalem, several other villages rooted in the Cotton name and several generations of males with variations of the Cotton name, all celebrated Sir Arthur Cotton’s bicentenary (Miscellany, May 12). Andhra Pradesh is celebrating Cotton’s contribution to making the Krishna-Godavari area the granary of South India while Tamil Nadu neglected to mark the contribution of this engineer who started his great hydraulic adventure in the Tamil areas of the Madras Presidency and helped green the Tanjore-Trichy Districts.

The Rajahmundry celebrations drew a very large crowd to hear four ministers - Finance, Major and Minor, Irrigation, and Cooperation - the local MLA and David Abbott of the British Deputy High Commission to recall the `Father of Irrigation’, `Sculptor of Deltas’. They pointed out that the 2 1/4 - mile long Dowleswaram Barrage across the Godavari, built at a cost of £120,000 over five years, turned a flood-and-drought prone area into million acres of flourishing paddy and sugarcane, where the rent of an acre of paddy land today is Rs.1 lakh. No wonder, it was pointed out, that “when the farmer tills his land (here) or receives the money for his produce, he thinks about only one man: Sir Arthur Cotton.”

Andhra’s celebration of Cotton will not, I learn, end with the garlanding of his statue or the words spoken at the several celebrations. A Sir Arthur Cotton Museum is to be set up at the dam site at a cost of Rs.1 crore and, more significantly, a Sir Arthur Cotton Memorial Agricultural Service Centre is being set up over 15 acres, at Bobbarlanka, 20 km from Rajahmundry and near Dowleswaram, at a cost of Rs.1 ¼ crore.

The reports of the Andhra celebrations also provide a whole lot of other snippets about the great builder. His voluminous biography, General Sir Arthur Cotton: His Life and Work, is described as “a classic on India’s development”. Its author, Lady Hope, is his daughter . In the biography, she writes, “India had taken hold of him. Not the India of romance, but the India of need”. The 500-page book was reprinted by the Institution of Engineers (India) in 1964.

I also learned that the bicentenary celebrations had been launched a year ago in Vishakhapatnam, where Cotton had spent two years before moving on to Rajahmundry and his greatest work. While at Vizag, he had built the St. John’s Church in Waltair(now named Visakahapatnam), and groynes to protect the beach. He also predicted that Vizag would one day be a great port. Truly was he a farsighted engineer!

S. MUTHIAH

Reference Link:
The Hindi Online
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/2003/06/02/stories/2003060200160300.htm
Monday, Jun 02, 2003

Photo: Pudi Ravi
A portrait of Sir Cotton at the railway station in Rajahmundry, Andhra Pradesh, India.
He is revered alonside historic figures from the state.