Alluri Sitarama Raju and the Rampa rising

The Madras Forest Act of 1882 closed much of the Eastern Ghats forest to podu, shifting cultivation, and to grazing, and contractors building roads through the hills pressed Koya and Konda Dora villagers into unpaid labour. Alluri Sitarama Raju, a young sannyasi from the plains who had settled in the hills, took up their grievances. On 22 August 1922 his men raided the police station at Chintapalli for guns, and on the next two days those at Krishnadevipeta and Rajavommangi.

For almost two years they fought a guerrilla war across the hills of the Visakhapatnam and Godavari agencies and ambushed police parties, and the Madras government brought in the Malabar Special Police and the Assam Rifles. Raju was captured in the forest on 7 May 1924 and shot dead at Koyyuru the same day. The official account said he was killed trying to escape; Telugu accounts call it an execution. His tomb is at Krishnadevipeta, where the pin is.

The rising was outside the Congress, which was then committed to non-violence, and it ran on local grievances. In Andhra, Raju has been a folk hero since, and in July 2022 the central government opened a year of celebrations for his 125th birth anniversary and the rising's centenary.