Page 61 - Muzaffargarh Gazzetteer

quickly and correctly; (2) the riverain areas and a few canal estates which at
settlement had been mapped inaccurately on account of the natural
difficulties; and (3) the great waste of the Thal of which as a whole there was
no satisfactory map, though the measurements of the isolated patches of
cultivation were sufficiently accurate for practical purposes.
Measurement of the Thal
The measurement of the Thal was made with great ease, accuracy and speed.
Almost the whole of the Thal had been broken up into rectangles for the
Sindh-Sagar Doaba Canal, and most of the boundary stones of these
rectangles were in sight. The area of the rectangles being known, all that was
necessary was to plot the rectangles on a mapping sheet and to take off set
from the two nearest stones to each well cylinder. This work was done on a
scale of 240 karams to the inch, which was too small for the practical work
of Patwaris. The cultivated land of each well was therefore measured
separately on the scale of 40 karams to the inch, the position of the well
cylinder only being recorded in the small scale map. Since there were no
permanent boundaries in the Thal, and most tri-junction pillars had long
been destroyed or buried under sand, the boundaries of the estates were
plotted from the map of the first settlement,
Measurement of Riverain Villages
The re-measurement of the riverain areas was carried out with the help of
the Survey of India, which prepared the sets of mapping sheets showing only
the boundary of the district. Once this work, which was onerous on account
of the wrong measurement at last settlement, was finished, these sheets were
filed in the record room.
The second set of mapping sheets was made for use of patwaris, wherein a
great number of triangles was plotted out, the size varying with the nature of
the country, and the angles, whenever possible, being fixed points such as
wells. With the aid of these sheets, which do away with all the sources of
error inseparable from measurements on a square system in riverain areas,
measurements were made with great ease and accuracy. Unfortunately, at
first, a system had been introduced for preparing the records, based on this
triangulation which was not suited to the circumstances of the district. The
patwaris entered with pencil in the sheets, the fields which they found on the
ground, and prepared khatunis based on this measurement. Later in the
season, when the floods came out and it was impossible to do work in the
villages, the patwaris retired to the headquarters of their Naib Tehsildar and
began the preparation of the permanent record. With the aid of the fixed
points, the measurements of the previous settlements were traced on the new
sheets, and permanent khatunis were then made without the knowledge of
the landowners. This system would have been workable, provided the old
measurements were correct but, since in the majority of the riverain estates
of the District Muzaffargarh, the old measurements were wrong, it caused a
sad mess, since even when there has been no change at all in the fields since

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