The Cotton Line: Testing the Institutional Persistence of an Erased Colonial Land-Tenure Boundary Across Vidarbha's Agrarian and Vegetation Geography

SAKSHI D. MASKE 

Are there 150-year-old institutional legacies measurable in the 21st century as a spatial signature, in patterns of vegetation phenology (cotton signatures), agrarian labor structure, land use and land surface temperature? That is the core question this paper addresses and the design is not a 'before'-'after', it's a 'spatial discontinuity' test to see if there is still a measurable gap across an administrative line following a historical change. It was in 1853 when the British stormed the Berar region, consisting of the districts Amravati, Akola, Buldhana, Washim, and Yavatmal, and implemented a new land-tenure system in the region known as the "Ryotwari" system. The American Civil War brought an end to the export of cotton from America to Lancashire, and Lancashire pressured Berar to fill that gap, which led to Berar becoming a producer of cotton on a monoculture basis. The six districts in the East of Berar (Nagpur, Wardha, Chandrapur, Bhandara, Gondia and Gadchiroli), the heart of the Central Provinces, were administered on a somewhat different system of settlement which was known as "Malguzari." The administrative boundary was officially renamed and discontinued in 1956, but it still corresponds, as would be the case today, to the current administrative division between Amravati Division and Nagpur Division.

Two annual seasons of kharif-rabi NDVI reducing indicate a similar signature. The negative difference for Berar was 0.325 in its performance as compared with 0.255 of Central Provinces in year one, showing difference of 0.070 points across 68 talukas in Berar. Back in Year two, which was a new set of scenes, the picture was virtually the same: Berar scored 0.316 and Central Provinces 0.241, a difference of 0.075. I wasn't convinced by that repetition over a single unusual year, but by the repetition over two independent cycles. Before constructing the boundary was possible, it had to be built – a 384.7 km new line formed by joining 120 talukas in their two historical segregations and separating them by extracting the common frontier between the two – but only after double-checking that it did not assume that the frontier aligned with the old boundary because they shared geographical characteristics, but made sure also that it matched the documented old boundary from 1903–56.

The headline null result was the failure to detect any significant level slope, collapse or shift along the historical trend line at any scale (immediate-boundary corridor of 32 talukas, or the extended scene footprint of 66-68 talukas) in the spatial-discontinuity regression (outcome ~ side + signed_dist_km + side×signed_dist_km + rainfall + elevation) of each of the outcomes. At the full footprint level, what the regression did reveal was a significant side×distance interaction for both EO outcomes (NDVI's decline: p = 0.0348; Land-Surface Temperature: p = 0.0105) — meaning the two sides follow different trends moving away from the old boundary, even without a sharp drop at it. The agricultural-laborer-to-cultivator ratio exhibited a similar slope difference at the corridor scale (p = 0.0361), with a similar direction for all 32 leave-one-out jackknife runs, but despite all this the slope difference at the full-footprint scale is offset by a level jump (p = 0.014) — not a contradiction to the underlying story but simply because the territory on the two sides of the corridor is lopsided within the satellite scene. Both these findings together imply no abrupt change of institution at the old Berar/Central Provinces border, but a rather subtle phenomenon: a strengthening gradient of the institution with increasing distance from the border. To reinforce the overall NDVI signal, a field-ground-truth effort was carried out against separate field-monitoring for the same field boundaries at Karanja Ghadge and Sawardoh villages of Wardha district, covering 7 boundary tests.