Before GPS, we had GTS!

Bengaluru: On a tiny lane off Bagalur main road in Kothanur, in a small corner beside sprawling villas stands a ruin. A stone wall once kept trouble-makers away, but it has been broken by miscreants. The ruin is only a few metres beyond the wall, but you will need to make your way through thorny shrubs and tall grass in an area notorious for cobras.

Only a handful of people in Bengaluru know the enormous historical significance of this unassuming structure – it is one of the endpoints of the Bangalore Baseline points of the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS), the century-long survey that began in 1800 established the height of Mount Everest and the Kanchenjunga and mapped every inch of the wild, tropical jungle that India was then. A century and a half of neglect has left the place in shambles and if the local Panchayat has its way, what should be a heritage site will make way for a Panchayat office instead.

The first baseline endpoints, measured by surveyor Colonel William Lambton between Agaram and K.R. Puram have since been destroyed. Colonel Lambton undertook the survey to map the terrain between Mangalore and Madras, to better understand the land that had now been brought under British control by the defeat of Tipu.

Tipu Sultan’s superior knowledge of the tropical terrain and the wild monsoons prolonged the Anglo-Mysore wars into thirty long years of bloodshed and death. Of a later, remeasured Bangalore baseline, one endpoint near Mekhri Circle has a small stone plaque to commemorate it, while the other endpoint on the Hennur-Bagalur Road has been forgotten and lies neglected in ruins. What should be a Mecca for engineering students across the country is a now no more than a patch of wasteland.

It was an IT professional from Bengaluru, Udaya Kumar P.L., who heard first about the Bangalore Baseline in November 2013 at a panel discussion “Bangalore the past in the present” organised by the Faceboook group “Bangalore Photos from a Bygone Era”.

He decided to take matters into his own hands and conducted an extensive study of the GTS and Bengaluru’s connection with it. Few people know that Bengaluru baseline points were actually the starting points of this mammoth India mapping exercise which was widely recognised as one of the greatest engineering feats this world has ever seen.

The entrance to the ruin itself is too overgrown with plants to be of much use, so one has to clamber in through a window. A round pit lies in the middle of the small stone chamber and a small slit in the wall lets in a small stream of sunlight. Miscreants have clearly tried to dig beneath the pit in search of treasure. “Over the pit was once rested the half-tonne theodolite (precision instrument used in surveys), so the surveyors could measure the angles between where they stood and other GTS stations,” said Udaya.

The baseline point in Hennur was constructed in 1868, when technology had developed a little more and the team decided to recheck its original points. (As it turned out, the original measurements were correct). The surveyors went from using iron links which stretched out to a length of 60 feet to using compensation bars, which they said provided a more precise measurement.

“The distance between Chennai and Bengaluru is 352 km, which we know now, thanks to satellite imagery,” said Udaya. “The GTS team had measured it accurately to a difference of only three inches from todays measure!” Mapping the distance of 36083.75095 feet between Hennur and Mekhri Circle took the team, which comprised of about 300 people at certain points, 40 days to complete!

“This is the Taj Mahal of engineering,” Udaya remarked, adding, “We should be doing our best to preserve these sites. Instead, we allow them to languish and fade away over decades of neglect, with only a handful of people out there who care enough to remember.”