Mills, mines and power: modern industry, 1880–1965

Between about 1880 and 1965, factories, mines and electric power came to parts of the Telugu lands.¹²³ Sugar refineries, mica and coal mines, jute and cotton mills gave new kinds of work, though handloom weaving remained the largest industry of the countryside.⁴⁵⁶⁷ This page tells the story district by district in the Madras districts, and then in Hyderabad State. For the older trade and crafts, see Trade & economy and Crafts & textiles.

About the sources. For the Madras districts the page uses the Imperial Gazetteer (1908), the Nellore gazetteer (1942) and the census of 1931.¹⁸⁹ For Hyderabad it uses Campbell’s book of 1898, the Nizam’s reports and year books, and a government souvenir of 1947.²¹⁰¹¹¹² The Telugu year book Prapancha Darsini (1955) is cited, not quoted.¹³

Sugar at Samalkot

The weavers of the Godavari district had once been famous, but by 1908 fine cloth was made only in a few villages near Kakinada and Palakollu.¹ The largest factory in the district was now the sugar refinery and distillery at Samalkot.¹ There the Deccan Sugar and Abkari Company employed 520 people a day.¹

The refinery made its sugar from palm jaggery (coarse sugar).¹ So more than 400,000 palmyra trees in the district were tapped for their juice.¹ By 1961 Andhra Pradesh had 11 sugar factories.¹⁴ Samalkot and the K.C.P. factory at Vuyyur each employed more than 500 people a day.¹⁴

Mica in Nellore

The Nellore district became the chief source of mica in the Madras Presidency.⁸ Mica is a mineral that splits into very thin sheets. According to the Nellore gazetteer, a wanderer found some mica near Rapur in about 1887.⁸ Rich landlords then searched the jungles for it, employing Yanadis, who seemed to know where to dig.⁸

The mica went to about half a dozen factories at Gudur.⁸ There about 1,000 families split it into thin films, the women and girls splitting and the men sorting and packing.⁸⁴ Over 3,000 labourers a day worked in the district.⁴ Exports rose from 486 tons in 1932 to 663 tons in 1937, sent mainly to Germany, Britain, America and Japan.⁴

Jute, rice and tobacco

Jute (a fibre for sacks) was grown mainly in the Visakhapatnam district.⁵ It was not Bengal jute but a kind of hemp from the Deccan, used the same way.⁵ By 1921 there were jute mills at Chittivalasa and at Eluru (then Ellore), and another opened at Nellimarla in 1922.⁵ In 1930–31 the jute mills of the Presidency had 941 looms and employed nearly 6,500 people.⁵

Small factories spread fast in the 1920s. In the whole Madras Presidency, the factories under the Factories Act rose from 511 in 1920 to 1,661 in 1930.⁹ Rice mills rose from 149 to 463, and groundnut factories from 2 to 194.⁹ In Guntur the tobacco trade grew steadily, and helped the town to grow.¹⁵ Kakinada sent large amounts of tobacco to Rangoon, where it was made into cheroots.¹⁶

The Andhra State in 1954

When the Andhra State was formed, it had no mills that wove cloth.¹³¹⁷ According to Prapancha Darsini, it had six spinning mills: two at Adoni and one each at Guntur, Pandalapaka, Rajahmundry and Guntakal.¹³¹⁷ Together they had 49,548 spindles, and the book expected all their yarn to go to the handloom weavers.¹⁷

The book says the state needed about 40 crore yards of cloth a year and had to buy about 20 crore yards from outside.¹⁷ An Andhra State handloom weavers’ co-operative society was set up at Vijayawada on 14 September 1953.¹⁷ It had 627 primary societies.¹⁷

Coal at Singareni

In Hyderabad State the most important new industry was coal. According to Campbell, work on the Singareni coalfield began in 1886, on behalf of the Hyderabad (Deccan) Company.² Real progress came in 1887, when T. Hughes of the Geological Survey of India arrived with English miners.² At first the company brought its workers from Warora, outside the state.² The railway reached the mines in 1888 (see Railways).¹⁸

In 1937–38 the Singareni colliery produced 711,089 tons of coal and employed 7,560 people.¹⁰ A smaller mine at Kothagudem produced 58,275 tons that year.¹⁰ It was served by a railway line opened in 1927.¹⁹ On 14 November 1944 the Nizam’s government bought the Singareni Collieries Company for Rs. 1,10,03,173.¹¹ It thought that only about 33 million tons had been mined in 45 years, from resources of 1,000 million tons.¹¹

By 1949 over 26,000 miners worked at Kothagudem, Singareni, Bellampalli and Sasti.²⁰ Kothagudem, with nearly 11,000, was the biggest mine in the state.²⁰ Through its Industrial Trust Fund, the government held nearly 90 per cent of the company’s shares.²⁰

Mills and factories in Hyderabad

In 1929 the Nizam’s government set up an Industrial Trust Fund of one crore rupees to lend to and help industries.¹² By 1947 the large factories it helped included cotton mills, a sugar factory, a paper mill, a cement factory and a cigarette factory.¹² During the Second World War new firms such as the Allwyn Metal Works were started with state money.²¹

Some of these mills stood in Telangana:

the Azam Jahi Mills at Warangal, one of six cotton mills in the state in 1945–46⁷
the Nizam Sugar Factory at Shakarnagar near Bodhan, whose company was formed in 1937, and which could crush 1,500 tons of cane a day²²
the Sirpur paper mill at Kagaznagar, which started work in April 1942 and gave work to about 2,500 people²²

The sugar factory employed about 4,000 people, and 10,000 more worked on its cane farms.⁶ The state had about 302 cotton ginning and pressing factories.⁶ Handloom weaving was still the largest industry of the countryside: the state had 1,12,000 looms, the most of them in Telangana, giving work to about 4,50,000 people.⁷

Electricity

Public electricity came first to a few towns. In the Madras Presidency, Rajahmundry got a public supply in the late 1920s, followed by Kakinada, Hindupur, Kurnool and Vijayawada.³ By 1932 Guntur and Tirupati had electricity undertakings too.³ The units generated in the Presidency nearly trebled between 1921 and 1931.³

In Hyderabad the city’s Electricity Department was founded in 1910 by R. L. Gamlen, the Mint Master.²³ In 1912 eleven lakh rupees were sanctioned for a proper power house.²³ In the 1930s a separate department brought electricity to the district towns.²⁴ Nizamabad and Raichur were electrified in 1934–35, and Warangal took its supply from the Azam Jahi Mills.²⁴ From 1944 the town of Yellandu bought its power from the Singareni company at Kothagudem.²⁴

Power and industry after 1947

After independence, big hydro-electric schemes were built. The Machkund scheme, on the northern border of the state, was completed in 1959–60 with six generating units.²⁵ The Tungabhadra scheme was shared by the Mysore and Andhra Pradesh states.²⁵ By the early 1960s the Tungabhadra and Hampi power stations each had four generators of 9 megawatts, and four more were being added.²⁶

On the coast, the shipyard at Visakhapatnam was bought by the Government of India in 1952 and run as Hindustan Shipyard Ltd. (see Roads, buses and ports).²⁷

Where the sources disagree

The sources do not agree on when coal mining at Singareni began:

Campbell (1898) says work on the coalfield began in 1886, and real progress came in 1887.²
The Hyderabad Statistical Year Book for 1941–45, describing the purchase of 1944, says the collieries had come into existence 45 years before.¹¹

Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Madras, Vol. I (1908), p. 279 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
A. Claude Campbell, Glimpses of the Nizam’s Dominions (1898), p. 499 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Census of India, 1931: Madras, Part I (1932), p. 222 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Johns, Nellore District Gazetteer (1942), p. 167 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Census of India, 1931: Madras, Part I (1932), p. 232 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Hyderabad-Deccan (1947), p. 94 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hyderabad-Deccan (1947), p. 95 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³
W. E. Johns, Gazetteer of the Nellore District, brought up to 1938, Vol. A (1942), p. 166 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Census of India, 1931: Madras, Part I (1932), p. 221 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³
Report on the Administration of H.E.H. the Nizam’s Dominions for the Year 1347 Fasli (1937–38) (1940), p. 106 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Figures only. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Statistical Year Book for 1351 to 1354 Fasli (1941–45) (1949), p. 1125 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Hyderabad-Deccan (souvenir of H.E.H. the Nizam’s Government for the Asian Regional Labour Conference, 1947), p. 90 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Kappagantula Satyanarayana (ed.), Prapancha Darsini (Andhra Directory and Year Book 1954–55, in Telugu) (1955), p. 513 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Census of India 1961, Vol. II: Andhra Pradesh, Part IV-A: Report on Housing and Establishments (1964), p. 47 (censusindia.gov.in (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²
Census of India, 1931, Vol. XIV: Madras, Part I, Report (1932), p. 62 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩
Imperial Gazetteer: Madras, Vol. I (1908), p. 294 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩
Satyanarayana (ed.), Prapancha Darsini (1955), p. 514 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
H.E.H. the Nizam’s Government: Statistical Year Book 1347 Fasli (1938) (1941), p. 768, table of railways open for traffic (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩
Census of India 1931, Vol. XXIII: H.E.H. the Nizam’s Dominions, Part I: Report (1933), p. 29 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩
The Hyderabad Government Bulletin on Economic Affairs, October–December 1949, p. 1043 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hyderabad-Deccan (1947), p. 91 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩
Hyderabad-Deccan (1947), p. 93 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²
H.E.H. the Nizam’s Government: Statistical Year Book 1347 Fasli (1938) (1941), p. 828 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²
Government of Hyderabad: Statistical Year Book for 1351 to 1354 Fasli (1941–45) (1949), p. 325 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Second Five Year Plan, Andhra Pradesh: Review of Progress 1959–60 (1960), p. 244 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²
A. Chandra Sekhar, Census of India 1961, Andhra Pradesh: District Census Handbook, Kurnool District (1964), p. lxv (censusindia.gov.in (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩
India 1958: A Reference Annual (1958), p. 330 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩