Building Megapolises While Rural Sri Lanka Burns

By Emil van der Poorten –November 6, 2016

Emil van der Poorten

In describing what the Maithripala/Ranil (MR2) lot are doing in the matter of following in the footsteps of the Mahinda Rajapaksa (MR1) mob the title of this piece is in fact an understatement of the larger reality. It seeks to describe in a very abbreviated form the destruction of the Sri Lankan environment as we know it and those who depend on it for sustenance. And in this, I do not confine my reference to the abomination that the land reclamation/port project in Colombo constitutes.

Knowledgeable environmentalists such as Ranil Senanayake have spoken incessantly about the truly enormous negative implications of these schemes which do little but fatten the purses of those in the commission-collection queues. The Rajapaksa horde did very well on all of that and while there is no gainsaying that the MR2 bunch could not avoid inheriting that pile of corruption there is no excuse for the latter continuing that process without missing a beat, so to speak.

The ignoramuses – and I am being kind in describing these mouthpieces for the Commission Kaakkas – who write reams to the media on the need for these huge schemes – are deliberately blind to the fact that such humungous projects have proven to be nothing but economic white elephants and/or contributed to problems such as Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Etiology as in the case of the accelerated Mahaweli Project. Read what Arundathi Roy had to say about the huge dam projects in India and how dead right she was proved to be. They simply created problems rather than provided solutions.

What macaques do to coconuts

“Small is beautiful” is not simply some romantic concept. It has proved to be the direction in which we should be going and, in some parts of the world which have learned the bitter lessons of “bigger is better” that is where governments are moving financially and philosophically, seeking reconstruction instead of glitz.

Do we have, over and over again, to walk in the footsteps of the greedy “developers” of the often-derided “west” whose behaviour has benefited no one but themselves, becoming complicit in their corruption? All of that, while trumpeting the fact that we are the beneficiaries of 2500 years of civilization?

A reading of Jane Jacobs might give some of our “planners” a few ideas on the direction in which we should be going. Admittedly, there is no glitter and glamour (and commissions) in that approach but it has certainly proved to be where salvation lies for urban dwellers. Jane moved from the US to Toronto where she, justifiably, proceeded to establish an iconic reputation in the matter of renewing the core of population centres.

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