Making a Village An Andhra Experiment

Making a Village: An Andhra Experiment Amrita Rangaswami RAMABHADRAPURAM, twin village of Ravada across the Vottigedda Reservoir in the Parvathipuram Agency in Andhra Pradesh, has order and symmetry. Its wide and sunshiny streets have been laid with a geometrical precision. The huts are evenly spaced and stand erect, their thatch and wooden doors smart and identical like uniforms on parade. The ration depot divides the village into even halves. The Ashram School, a long narrow hut, stands at one end of the village, Ramahhadrapuram, at the foot of the hills in the Kuruppam Block in Srikakulam district, has perhaps been constructed according to specifications laid down in a little-known manual of the Andhra Pradesh Revenue Department. But its community has been assembled according to What may be called "the cut-and-paste" method. The people of the hill villages of Kiddigesu Balleru, Chinnatolumanda, Nimmakava- sala Kittalaguda, Kondamadigallu and Savaraguda have been taken out of their villages in the hills and resettled in homes that are as marked and as accessible as files in a cabinet. Each village community has a street to itself and the street bears the amine of the village of origin of the 'migrants'. "These people have always liked to live in isolated villages", commented an official. The tribal has now lost the right to privacy.