ABSTRACT
The quickening of general intelligence and interest in matters outside the struggle for a meagre living which came from such beginnings made the peasantry of Guntur responsive to waves of political enthusiasm when constitutional changes came. The zemindari villages of Ganjam, Mr. A. P. Patro remarked, were much more poverty-stricken than ryotwari ones, in which the State was the landlord. Rajahmundry is on the Godavari River, at the head of the delta which was converted by Cotton's greatest irrigation scheme into the most prosperous area in the Madras Presidency. The economic conditions of Guntur are similar to those of the Godavari; the greater part of the district is in the Kistna Delta, irrigated by the Cotton's great schemes. The higher standard of wages which is possible there also allows for a higher standard of general culture, and in Guntur there were men of imagination and initiative who supplied the necessary impulse.
