Roads, buses and ports, 1850–1967

Before the railway, goods in the Telugu lands moved by bullock cart, pack animal, country boat and sailing ship.¹²³ From the 1850s the governments built roads, and in the 1930s motor buses began to run on them.⁴⁵ On the coast, the railway took trade away from the old ports, until a new harbour opened at Visakhapatnam in 1933.⁶³⁷ The railways themselves are told on Railways in the Telugu lands, and the older ports on Trade & economy.

About the sources. The page uses the Imperial Gazetteers of Madras (1908) and Hyderabad (1909), the district gazetteers, the census reports of 1931 and 1951, and a Hyderabad government souvenir of 1947.¹⁸⁹¹⁰⁵ For the 1950s and 1960s it uses the Telugu year book Prapancha Darsini (1955) and the Andhra Pradesh statistical abstract of 1967, which are cited but not quoted.¹¹¹²

Roads and the road cess

In the Madras districts, roads were paid for by a cess (local tax) on land.⁴ In 1853 Edward Maltby, the Collector of South Arcot, suggested a cess of one anna on every kani of land for roads.⁴ It was brought into several districts from 1854.⁴ The Madras Road Cess Act of 1866 raised it to six pies in every rupee of land revenue.¹³

Few roads existed before this. In 1854 an engineer reported that little had been done in the Kadapa (then Cuddapah) and Nellore districts beyond the great north road through Nellore.⁹ The district boards later took charge of the roads.¹ By 1903 they kept up 22,200 miles of road in the Presidency.¹ The chief through route was the northern trunk road from Madras to Calcutta.¹

Roads built in famines

Many roads were built to give work to the hungry. In the Kadapa district, several roads were finished only during the great famine of 1876–78.¹⁴ Others, such as the road from Proddatur to Jammalamadugu, came from the famine relief works of 1897.¹⁴ From 1879–80 the Local Fund Boards took over all the roads of the district.¹⁴

Carts, boats and the first motors

The bullock carts of the Madras districts were well made, with spoked wheels five feet high and iron tyres.¹⁵ For passengers on busy roads there were light two-wheeled covered carts called jatkas, pulled by ponies.¹⁵ In the hills of the Visakhapatnam district, people used a sarugudu, a sledge of two bamboos pulled by cattle.²

Water carried much of the trade of the deltas. In 1908 the canals of the Godavari delta were 493 miles long, and those of the Krishna delta 307 miles.¹⁵ They were joined to the Buckingham Canal, so that boats could go all the way to Madras.¹⁵ The government ran four steamers on the Godavari canals and three on the Krishna canals.¹⁵

The railway took traffic from the roads at first. The Nellore gazetteer says the Madras–Calcutta trunk road became less important after the East Coast Railway opened in 1899.¹⁶ After the First World War, motor vehicles made the road important again.¹⁶ Some old trade routes were almost deserted by 1908, because the railways had changed the course of trade.¹⁵

Roads in Hyderabad State

In Hyderabad, trunk roads already ran from the capital to Sholapur, Gulbarga, Kurnool, Machilipatnam (then Masulipatam), Hanamkonda and Nagpur before 1868.⁸ Some had been built by the British army to move troops, and they were handed to the state about 1867.⁸ The Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 says that, except near the city, no road in the state was as good as a first-class road in British India.⁸

The state built many roads in the 1920s. Its road mileage rose from 2,481 in 1920–21 to 3,938 in 1930–31.¹⁰ The 1931 census noted that metalled (stone-surfaced) roads had brought in motor services, and that villagers were getting used to them.¹⁰

The Nizam’s buses

In 1932 the Nizam’s State Railway began to run buses that linked with its trains.⁵ It started with 27 buses over 280 miles of route.⁵ By 1947 it owned 651 motor vehicles running over more than 4,000 miles.⁵ The 1951 census says its Road Transport Department ran almost all the bus services in the state.¹⁷

After 1948 the new government planned to nationalise road transport (bring it under the state).¹⁸ In the period covered by its report of 1950, the department ran buses over 4,944.9 miles of road, and private operators over 4,153.5 miles.¹⁸

Buses in Andhra

According to the Telugu year book Prapancha Darsini (1955), the Andhra State had 14,039 miles of road in March 1954.¹¹ It also had 1,846 passenger buses running on 647 routes.¹¹ By 1966–67 the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation had on average 1,654 buses in use.¹² That year its buses carried over 28 crore passengers.¹²

The decline of the old ports

Machilipatnam had been the chief port of the coast. The official account of the Governor of Madras’s tour in 1903 lists the causes said to explain its decline.⁶ They were the decay of handicrafts, the silting of the port, the cyclone of 1864, the removal of the army cantonment, and the town’s long exclusion from the railway.⁶

Kakinada (then Cocanada) took its place for a time.³ In 1908 it was the chief port north of Madras, but it had declined because of the railway and the silting of the bay.³ Ships anchored four and a half miles out at sea.³ Its main exports were cotton, oilseeds, rice and tobacco.³ In 1903, 23,400 passengers sailed from it, all for Burma.³

By the 1950s, Kakinada was still the first of the minor ports.⁷ A committee of the central government considered making it a major port.⁷ It advised against this, because Visakhapatnam was only 80 miles away, and the government accepted the advice.⁷

The Visakhapatnam harbour

At Visakhapatnam, a sand bar kept forming across the mouth of the backwater (the lagoon behind the shore).¹⁹ In 1899 A. T. Mackenzie of the Public Works Department studied the problem.¹⁹ He proposed a groyne (a wall into the sea) from the Dolphin’s Nose hill to stop the bar forming, at a cost of about 30 lakhs.¹⁹ The coming railway line to Raipur made the plan practical.¹⁹

According to Prapancha Darsini, a harbour had been planned since the days of the East India Company, but no real work began until 1925.⁷ The harbour opened to ships in 1933.⁷ The 1931 census already noticed that the building of the harbour had made the town grow.²⁰ By the 1950s it was the only major port of the Andhra State, run by an officer of the central government.¹¹⁷

The shipyard

Visakhapatnam also had a shipyard. In March 1952 the Government of India bought the Visakhapatnam shipyard from the Scindia Steam Navigation Company.²¹ It was handed to a new company, Hindustan Shipyard Ltd., two-thirds owned by the government.²¹ By 1958 the yard had built 19 sea-going ships, and it could build four ships a year.²¹

Into the air

Hyderabad was also early in the air. In 1938 the Nizam’s State Railway set up an Air Department, which for a short while ran a twice-weekly service from Hyderabad to Bangalore and Madras.⁵²² After the Second World War a company, Deccan Airways, was formed with the railway as a major shareholder.²² By 1947 it flew from Hyderabad to Madras, Bangalore, Bombay and Delhi.²²

Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Madras, Vol. I (1908), p. 77 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
W. Francis, Madras District Gazetteers: Vizagapatam, Vol. I (1907), p. 144 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²
Imperial Gazetteer: Madras, Vol. I (1908), p. 294 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Imperial Gazetteer: Madras, Vol. I (1908), p. 108 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Hyderabad-Deccan (souvenir of H.E.H. the Nizam’s Government for the Asian Regional Labour Conference, 1947), p. 100 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Tours of His Excellency Lord Ampthill (1904), p. 1176, account of the visit to Masulipatam (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³
Satyanarayana (ed.), Prapancha Darsini (1955), p. 513 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Hyderabad State (1909), p. 45 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
C. F. Brackenbury, Madras District Gazetteers: Cuddapah, Vol. I (1915), p. 118 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²
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)). ↩ ↩² ↩³
Kappagantula Satyanarayana (ed.), Prapancha Darsini (Andhra Directory and Year Book 1954–55, in Telugu) (1955), p. 512 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Statistical Abstract, Andhra Pradesh, 1966 and 1967 (1967), p. 146, table 11.3 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; figures only. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Imperial Gazetteer: Madras, Vol. I (1908), p. 109 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩
Brackenbury, Cuddapah (1915), p. 119 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³
Imperial Gazetteer: Madras, Vol. I (1908), p. 78 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
W. E. Johns, Gazetteer of the Nellore District, brought up to 1938, Vol. A (1942), p. 178 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²
Census of India, 1951, Vol. IX: Hyderabad, Part I-A: Report (1953), p. 259 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩
Report on the Administration of the Hyderabad State (1950), p. 79 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²
Francis, Vizagapatam (1907), p. 328 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Census of India, 1931, Vol. XIV: Madras, Part I, Report (1932), p. 62 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). ↩
India 1958: A Reference Annual (1958), p. 330 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hyderabad-Deccan (1947), p. 101 (archive.org (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³