Peripheral road development Sri Lanka.

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