Grand Anicut edit extracted from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (using Wikipedia Reflection Script)

The Grand Anicut, also known as the Kallanai, is an ancient dam built on the Kaveri River in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India.

Kallanai Built By Karikalan, A Chola King. (This image also shows 19th century additions to the ancient dam)

It was built by the Chola king Karikalan around the 1st Century AD¹ and is considered one of the oldest water-diversion or water-regulator structures in the world, still in use.²³ The Kaveri River forms the boundary between the Erode and Salem districts. The Bhavani River joins the Kaveri at the town of Bhavani, where the Sangameswarar Temple, an important pilgrimage spot in southern India, was built at the confluence of the two rivers. Sweeping past the historic rock of Tiruchirapalli, it breaks into two channels at the island of Srirangam, which enclose between them the delta of Thanjavur (Tanjore), the garden of South India.

The northern channel is called the Kollidam (Kolidam); the other preserves the name of Kaveri, and empties into the Bay of Bengal at Poompuhar, a few hundred miles south of Chennai (Madras). On the seaward face of its delta are the seaports of Nagapattinam and Karikal. Irrigation works have been constructed in the delta for over 2,000 years.

The Kallanai is a massive dam of unhewn stone, 329 metres (1,080 ft) long and 20 metres (60 ft) wide, across the main stream of the Kaveri. The purpose of the dam was to divert the waters of the Kaveri across the fertile Delta region for irrigation via canals. The dam is still in excellent repair, and supplied a model to later engineers, including the Sir Arthur Cotton's 19th-century dam across the Kollidam, the major tributary of the Kaveri. The area irrigated by the ancient irrigation network of which the dam was the centrepiece was 69,000 acres (280 square kilometres). By the early 20th century the irrigated area had been increased to about 1,000,000 acres (4,000 square kilometres).

References

Notes

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

[1] "Cauvery River." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 12 Feb. 2007

Photo of Grand Anicut

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