Town Planning in Ancient India c11.8

c11.8

perspective and was an adept in joinery works of all sorts. All these were permanent officers under the king. In the Arthaśāstra we find, among the other duties of the city superintendent, that he had to make a daily inspection of the reservoirs of water, of roads, of the hidden passages for going out of the city, of forts, fort-walls and their defensive works. Though we do not meet with any written records about the existence of an organised board like the modern Improvement Trust and the like, yet we may, without largely drawing upon imagination, fairly presume that the permanent officials of the king such as the civic architect, the city superintendent, together with their assistants, constituted the prototype and served the purpose of the modern institutions organised with cognate objects. The elaborate way in which the treatises on Indo-Aryan town-planning allot sites and determine the areas and orientation of roads, wards, residential buildings, the royal palace, the council house, parks, and reservoirs, and secure proper lighting and ventilation by fixing the space intervening between two houses or ascertain the number of storeys and their respective heights in case of particular buildings and edifices, conclusively establish that the master-builder possessed and exercised substantial control over all building operations in the city. So elaborate and intensive indeed was the control that even absolute private ownership of land in the city was not allowed to some extent. There seems to have been several departments or divisions of functions: one was entrusted with the construction of roads; another with tanks, gardens, artificial forests, and places; the third with fortifications; and the fourth with buildings. All these departments as also the engineers, to wit, the Sthapati and others, were under the charge of a minister, called the Gṛhādyadhipati (literally, the lord of houses and the like) who held the portfolio of superintendence and planning of the city. Śukrāchāryya says that he must attend to palaces, ditches, forts, parapets, statues, weapons, tanks, wells, and reservoirs, pipes, and other engineering works.¹ Surely the foregoing are exactly those functions with which the modern Municipalities and Improvement Trusts are concerned.