Not so obvious values of peripheral road
development Sri Lanka
In the news has been the
visible development of the main roads all over the country. Not confined
to Colombo alone.
But often unnoted
by the traveller has been the equally valuable development of the
smaller roads in the provinces and the village areas ( pradeshiya sabha) going on for years. Few have the
time to go through thousands of by roads and village tracks.
Attached is the news of the planned
investment of a further $ 1200 million
into a thousand of these provincial/village roads.
Maybe it is election time, but unlike in former times, they are not beginning now; they have been at it for
years, for decades though at a slower pace.
Some patriots have
been critical of this peripheral financial input, some even going so far
as to condemn even the new rd to hitherto isolated Mulaithivu.
But one needs ask for
opinion only from the villager beneficiaries who serendipitously got quick road
access in case of health, business reasons etc etc.
Referring to my familiar area, the health sector too has kept pace, the budget of 124 million last year spent and upped
to 159 million this year.
The upgrading of peripheral hospitals have kept young
orthopaedic surgeons reasonably happy, so that many of them are doing work
there, not scooting to greener pastures as was happening in the
past decades.
I am not able to comment
on the third important factor schooling, but that seem to have kept pace too.
Today, there is promise
of a better life for the locals who are (farming) the
backbone of food production.
Hopefully more and more will find acceptable
productive work in these difficult areas, what with present droughts and future
floods.
To wit, my former car driver is now back home in Tissa
driving as well as developing his family paddy land, also putting up a new
house at a slow pace.
There is no immediate
visible result on these govt. investments, except in the long term. But it is a
must.
Today Embilipitiya is a well to
do town or city ( buses leaving the town
stand every 5 minutes,) after decades of development efforts and
today much of our farm produce is sourced from it.
Dambulla is another, a
rustic town not so long ago, now about the
most important market centre of produce in the whole country.
Ampara yet another.
In the last ten years of
my travel there has been such development wherever we went, excluding the former ‘war’ areas which we avoided
then.
(Looking at
the sparsely populated north, I wonder who will settle back in their own
agricultural regions without jumping out for better pastures?
Some
doctors stationed there say that their work load is too small! (Other than
Jaffna peninsula) to warrant too many medical specialities.
Seems some
of the western province entrepreneurs of all hues are tapping these regions
putting up hotels and fishing businesses)
Going back 40 years to
the past, as I know, the Canadians offered us a developed road work in the
1970s which our socialist govt. was not interested in. Maybe we could
have avoided some nasty events originating from the poor regions? Only gives
more reason why we need develop under developed areas, if only to avoid
roots and pockets of violence.
Keeping this short.
jksw
