Features
Exiled as GA to Ampara and the splendours of Gal Oya Valley
(Excerpted from Rendering Unto Caesar by Bradman Weerakoon)
I was expecting a transfer to the outstations but had not really thought it would be Ampara – one of the farthest districts to reach from Colombo and one of the least developed. When in the 1950s, on the initiative of D S Senanayake, the Gal Oya river was dammed at Inginiyagala, the American construction firm of Morrison Knudsen paid off with the country’s earned foreign exchange, and the colonists from the over-populated wet zone were brought in, the district was buzzing with activity.
Change was in the air. Even the casual visitor could scarcely fail to notice that a new world of broad roads and fine buildings was being created as well as a chain of small reservoirs with the names of both Sinhala and Tamil villages like Namal Oya, Kondewattuwan and Pannalgama. The Gal Oya Development Board in those days had a very competent leadership and plentiful resources, and had got going with a great deal of productive development.
However, when I arrived some 20 years later all that had changed. There was visible everywhere an aura of neglect and complacency. The district appeared to have slipped back into the familiar, somnolent rhythm of life that the dry zone so insidiously induces. The inevitable jungle tide, so close at hand in this most hostile of environments, seemed to have returned.
I felt that I needed to get busy very quickly, encourage the bright, young and eager-looking SLAS (Sri Lanka Administrative Service) team of assistants I had inherited and re-establish the authority of the civil administration. The task was not going to be easy because the whole area had been dominated for the past 20 years by the specially mandated and richly resourced Gal Oya Valley Development Authority.
I found that personal relationships between the GA’s administration and the Board were at a very- low ebb. After many peak-points of tension and a long tussle to assert who was the leader, the government agent, my good friend and colleague Victor Unantenna, and the Resident Manager (RM) of the GODB, Padmasiri de Silva, were not even on speaking terms. They communicated if they had to, by usually writing long and vituperative minutes to each other in the official files; and all the time this letter writing went on, they were both in the same building.
The government agent and his kachcheri had been located on the ground floor and the GODB resident manager and his staff, as perhaps befitted their perceived higher status – and it was the Board that had constructed the Secretariat – on the upper floor!
My appointment coincided with the winding-up of the Board’s activities in the Valley and I knew that soon I was going to inherit the whole of the Board’s empire. One of my first tasks was to have to engineer and carry through the transition process. This turned out to be easier than expected. Once I adopted the practice of walking upstairs into the RM’s room to discuss an issue, there was immediate reciprocity and he came down to see me. After that we got on very well together. Eventually when the Board left Ampara, I had the choice of upgrading my accommodation from the lowly B 1 residential quarters that the GA had occupied fill then, and move into the luxurious air-conditioned Resident Manager’s bungalow. This four-bedroom residence, built and furnished by the Board, commanded one of the finest views in town. It overlooked the large Ampara Tank – the source of the town’s water supply, and offered the blue Mahakandiya range of mountains as its majestic backdrop.
I was given the choice if I wished of moving two miles out of town to the GODB (Gal Oya Development Board) circuit bungalow – an eight-roomed mansion – but decided against this move because that would have kept me away from the Ampara town and access to my officials and the people. So Damayanthi and I soon moved with obvious delight to the former Resident Manager’s bungalow a few yards up the road.
My first few days in Ampara were spent trying to grasp the enormity of the tasks of civil administration at the periphery, that needed the government agent’s attention. The civil administration was symbolized by the kachcheri, a venerable institution of hoary origins. Its institution dated back to the third decade of the 19th century and the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms.
The position of government agent was manned in colonial times by young men with a good public school education and usually an Oxford Degree in classics. The career of Leonard Woolf, husband of the famous writer Virginia Woolf, illustrated the kind of path that others with a successful outlook would follow.
By the 1970s, the native breed that followed the British and were notably represented by members of the Ceylon Civil Service had almost died out. There were still some civil servants in the field but the spirit of the ‘club’ and its special elite quality now lay broken. Some were wont to say that the rot had started after the abolition of the CCS in 1963, principally on the initiative of Felix Dias Bandaranaike.
I found the work fascinatingly different from what I had done for 15 years in the prime minister’s office. Here, one was at the root of the problem. This was where it all started: the search by young men and women for employment, hunger for land, shortage of water for agriculture, schools for the children, hospitals for the sick, and the overall struggle for survival. But what encouraged me most and kept all of us active was the indomitable will of ordinary people to keep going in the face of impossible odds. The bureaucracy was, for the most part, uncaring and the political leadership partial in the distribution of its largesse.
My wife and I decided that this was a heaven-sent opportunity to indulge and enjoy ourselves in the work with the knowledge that what little you could do was being really appreciated by those
waiting for some service. One early instance of this was when, after literally hacking our way through jungle to get to a distant village on the Moneragala border, I was greeted by people who said that the agantha hamuruduruwo himself — the government agent — had not visited their particular village in living memory.
Ampara was a treasure trove of surprises. Its physical landscape was quite variegated contrary to the usual vision of the dry zone as a dreary plain of scrub jungle. It had large expanses of water as a result of the development work of the Gal Oya Board and vast stretches of paddy fields below them. If you entered the district from the west, driving down to Ampara from the great dam at Inginiyagala, you would be literally in a green valley.
Once when Dudley Senanayake was waxing eloquent in Parliament about how green the valley looked in full season, Felix is said to have baited him by asking him, “How green is your valley?” It is reported that Dudley, losing his cool, had advanced menacingly towards him muttering, “I’ll show you how green my valley is,” until he was stopped by the intervention of his friend M D Banda.
Elsewhere in Ampara the broad plain was covered with thick tropical jungle and jagged rock outcrops — silent sentinels that carried the names given to them by the early explorers who had chanced upon them in their survey work. The landscape was immortalized in the writings of R L Spittel, the Colombo surgeon who spent his spare time in researching the Veddahs — an aboriginal people of the island. In. my childhood I had devoured his books, all of which had been meticulously collected by my father.
The rock outcrops carried the most interesting names. One which I could dimly see as I looked south from my bedroom window was called `Westminster Abbey’. It lay some thirty kilometres away as one proceeded southwards from Hingurana on the Moneragala road. Another had been appropriately named ‘Friar’s Hood’, as it looked out under its jutting hood across Bintenna towards Maha Oya and to the Mahaweli ganga in the distance.
The Gal Oya Project
The heart of Ampara district was the Gal Oya Project. Although in the last 50 years the country had gigantic irrigation and power projects providing much more power and water, the Gal Oya Project
continues to have an enduring national significance. Its construction paralleled the birth of the new nation. Much of the pride of its creation came from the fact that this large multipurpose irrigation and hydropower project was done without resort to foreign borrowings.
To have finally come to Ampara as a government agent was in a sense a dream come true. I had, as a young student of Sociology at the University of Ceylon and under one of its American professors, Bryce Ryan, visited the valley to help in his research of the breakdown of traditional village structures. Our hypothesis had been that the modernizing impulses of colonization, bringing in settlers from the wet zone districts like Kegalle, Kandy and Matara would have greatly hastened the breakdown. When I arrived in 1970, twenty years later, the process was almost complete except for a very few purana villages which lay mostly at the back of the great reservoir and stubbornly maintained their traditional way of life.
In 1951, when the massive earth dam at Inginiyagala was being raised, I had stood on its height and looking west, marveled at the spread of the vast man-made lake as it engulfed the jungle. The blue foothills of Bible and the forbidding Knuckles range beyond provided a spectacular backdrop. I harboured a dream that some day I might have the chance of playing a larger part in the development of this new region which was being carved out of the larger Batticaloa district.
It was potentially productive and with its now mixed population of Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim people was representative of the multi-ethnic, plural entity that Sri Lanka was fast becoming. By a quirk of fate and on the irrational decision of the then government, I was now to serve for a while in one of the more remote districts of the country after 15 years at the centre of power. I found myself now with an opportunity of making this move towards the realization of a dream after 20 years since I had first set foot in this greenest of the country’s man-made valleys.
In 1970 the Gal Oya Development Board was still functioning actively in the area of its authority. It had been patterned in structure and function, in the wisdom of the first prime minister D S Senanayake, on the Tennesse Valley Authority of the United States. It was held that rapid and integrated development of virgin lands, needed the flexibility of a new coordinating mechanism – the veritable creation of a regional government within an existing overall national government. In 1970 the presence of the Board was yet very visible all over. In fact, other than for the function of law and order which was a subject for the National Police, all other activities within the territory and jurisdiction of the Gal Oya Board (which constituted a large part of the Ampara district ) was in the hand of that authority.
The supply of irrigation, power, drinking water, the alienation and management of land, agricultural extension services, cottage industry, some part of tertiary education (the Hardy Technical Training Institute, for example) and most functions which would normally be regarded as part of civil administration under the charge of a normal government agency were, by virtue of the Gal Oya Board Act, statutorily under the control of the Board.
Even in such aspects usually regarded as of a social and cultural nature such as the running of the local club, the maintenance of the playing fields, and the conduct of the annual religious festivals at Digawapi and the Buddangala hermitage, it was the Board’s writ that ran. Most of the buildings in Ampara town and Inginiyagala had been constructed, maintained, occupied and disposed of by the Board.
It could be quite premature to claim that the US has closed ranks completely with the world’s foremost fascist states: Russia, China and North Korea. But there is no denying that the US is breaking with tradition and perceiving commonality of policy orientation with the mentioned authoritarian states of the East rather than with Europe and its major democracies at present.
Increasingly, it is seemingly becoming evident that the common characterization of the US as the ‘world’s mightiest democracy’, could be a gross misnomer. Moreover, the simple fact that the US is refraining from naming Russia as the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and its refusal to perceive Ukraine’s sovereignty as having been violated by Russia, proves that US foreign policy is undergoing a substantive overhaul, as it were. In fact, one could not be faulted, given this backdrop, for seeing the US under President Donald Trump as compromising its democratic credentials very substantially.
Yet, it could be far too early to state that in the traditional East-West polarity in world politics, that the US is now squarely and conclusively with the Eastern camp that comprises in the main, China and Russia. At present, the US is adopting an arguably more nuanced approach to foreign policy formulation and the most recent UN Security Council resolution on Ukraine bears this out to a degree. For instance, the UN resolution in question reportedly ‘calls for a rapid end to the war without naming Russia as the aggressor.’
That is, the onus is being placed on only Ukraine to facilitate an end to the war, whereas Russia too has an obligation to do likewise. But it is plain that the US is reflecting an eagerness in such pronouncements to see an end to the Ukraine conflict. It is clearly not for a prolongation of the wasting war. It could be argued that a negotiated settlement is being given a try, despite current international polarizations.
However, the US could act constructively in the crisis by urging Russia as well to ensure an end to the conflict, now that there is some seemingly friendly rapport between Trump and Putin.
However, more fundamentally, if the US does not see Ukraine’s sovereignty as having been violated by Russia as a result of the latter’s invasion, we are having a situation wherein the fundamental tenets of International Law are going unrecognized by the US. That is, international disorder and lawlessness are being winked at by the US.
It follows that, right now, the US is in cahoots with those powers that are acting autocratically and arbitrarily in international politics rather than with the most democratically vibrant states of the West, although a facile lumping together of the US, Russia and China, is yet not possible.
It is primarily up to the US voting public to take clear cognizance of these developments, draw the necessary inferences and to act on them. Right now, nothing substantive could be done by the US voter to put things right, so to speak, since mid-term US elections are due only next year. But there is ample time for the voting public to put the correct perspective on these fast-breaking developments, internationally and domestically, and to put their vote to good use in upcoming polls and such like democratic exercises. They would be acting in the interest of democracy worldwide by doing so.
More specifically it is up to Donald Trump’s Republican voter base to see the damage that is being done by the present administration to the US’ standing as the ‘world’s mightiest democracy’. They need to bring pressure on Trump and his ‘inner cabinet’ to change course and restore the reputation of their country as the foremost democracy. In the absence of such action it is the US citizenry that would face the consequences of Trump’s policy indiscretions.
Meanwhile, the political Opposition in the US too needs to get its act together, so to speak, and pressure the Trump administration into doing what is needed to get the US back to the relevant policy track. Needless to say, the Democratic Party would need to lead from the front in these efforts.
While, in the foreign policy field the US under President Trump could be said to be acting with a degree of ambivalence and ambiguity currently, in the area of domestic policy it is making it all to plain that it intends to traverse a fascistic course. As has been proved over the past two months, white supremacy is being made the cardinal principle of domestic governance.
Trump has made it clear, for example, that his administration would be close to ethnic chauvinists, such as the controversial Ku Klux Klan, and religious extremists. By unceremoniously rolling back the ‘diversity programs’ that have hitherto helped define the political culture of the US, the Trump administration is making no bones of the fact that ethnic reconciliation would not be among the government’s priorities. The steady undermining of USAID and its main programs worldwide is sufficient proof of this. Thus the basis has been adequately established for the flourishing of fascism and authoritarianism.
Yet, the US currently reflects a complex awareness of foreign policy questions despite having the international community wondering whether it is sealing a permanent alliance with the main powers of the East. For instance, President Trump is currently in conversation on matters in the external relations sphere that are proving vital with the West’s principal leaders. For example, he has spoken to President Emmanuel Macron of France and is due to meet Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the UK.
Obviously, the US is aware that it cannot ‘go it alone’ in resolving currently outstanding issues in external relations, such as the Ukraine question. There is a clear recognition that the latter and many more issues require a collaborative approach.
Besides, the Trump administration realizes that it cannot pose as a ‘first among equals’, given the complexities at ground level. It sees that given the collective strength of the rest of the West that a joint approach to problem solving cannot be avoided. This is particularly so in the case of Ukraine.
The most major powers of the West are no ‘pushovers’ and Germany, under a possibly Christian Democratic Union-led alliance in the future, has indicated as much. It has already implied that it would not be playing second fiddle to the US. Accordingly, the US is likely to steer clear of simplistic thinking in the formulation of foreign policy, going forward.
by Upali Gamakumara,
Upali.gamakumara@gmail.com
The Clean Sri Lanka (CSL) is a project for the true renaissance the NPP government launched, the success of which would gain world recognition. It is about more than just cleaning up places. Its broader objectives are to make places attractive and happy for people who visit or use services in the country, focusing more on the services in public institutions and organisations like the SLTB. Unfortunately, these broader objectives are not apparent in its theme, “Clean Sri Lanka,” and therefore there is a misconception that keeping the environment clean is the main focus.
People who realise the said broader objectives are excited about a cleaner Sri Lanka, hoping the President and the government will tackle this, the way they are planning to solve other big problems like the economy and poverty. However, they do not see themselves as part of the solution.
From the management perspective, the CSL has a strategic plan that is not declared in that manner. When looking at the government policies, one can perceive its presence, the vision being “A Prosperous Nation and a Beautiful Life,” the mission “Clean Sri Lanka” and the broader objectives “a disciplined society, effective services, and a cleaner environment.” If the government published these as the strategy, there would have been a better understanding.
Retaining the spirit and expectations and continuing the ‘Clean Sri Lanka’ project is equally important as much as understanding its deep idea. For this, it needs to motivate people, which differs from those motivators that people push to achieve selfish targets. The motivation we need here is to evolve something involuntarily, known as Drivers. Drivers push for the survival of the evolution or development of any entity. We see the absence of apparent Drivers in the CSL project as a weakness that leads to sporadic hiccups and free flow.
Drivers of Evolution
Drivers vary according to the nature of envisaged evolution for progress. However, we suggest that ‘the force that pushes anything to evolve’ would fit all evolutions. Some examples are: ‘Fitting to survival’ was the driver of the evolution of life. Magnetism is a driver for the unprecedented development of physics – young Einstein was driven to enquire about the ‘attraction’ of magnets, eventually making him the greatest scientist of the 20th century.
Leadership is a Driver. It is essential but do not push an evolution continually as they are not sprung within a system involuntarily. This is one of the reasons why CSL has lost the vigour it had at its inception.
CSL is a teamwork. It needs ‘Drives’ for cohesion and to push forward continually, like the Quality Improvement Project of the National Health Service (NHS) in England. Their drivers are outlined differently keeping Aims as their top driver and saying: Aims should be specific and measurable, not merely to “improve” or “reduce,” engage stakeholders to define the aim of the improvement project and a clear aim to identify outcome measures.
So, we think that CSL needs Aims as defined by NHS, built by stakeholder participation to help refine the project for continuous evolution. This approach is similar to Deming’s Cycle for continual improvement. Further, two more important drivers are needed for the CSL project. That is Attitudinal Change and Punishment. We shall discuss these in detail under Psychoactive Environment (pSE) below.
Aside from the above, Competition is another driver in the business world. This helps achieve CSL objectives in the private sector. We can see how this Driver pushes, with the spread of the Supermarket chains, the evolution of small and medium retail shops to supermarket level, and in the private banks and hospitals, achieving broader objectives of CSL; a cleaner environment, disciplined behaviuor, efficient service, and the instillation of ethics.
The readers can now understand the importance of Drivers pushing any project.
Three Types of Entities and Their Drives
We understand, that to do the transformation that CSL expects, we need to identify or adopt the drivers separately to suit the three types of entities we have in the country.
Type I entities are the independent entities that struggle for their existence and force them to adopt drivers involuntarily. They are private sector entities, and their drivers are the commitment of leadership and competition. These drivers spring up involuntarily within the entity.
Type II are the dependent entities. To spring up drivers of these entities commitment of an appointed trustee is a must. Mostly in state-owned entities, categorized as Boards, Authorities, Cooperations, and the like. Their drivers do not spring up within or involuntarily unless the leader initiates. The Government of a country also falls into this type and the emergence of drivers depends on the leader.
Type III entities have neither independent nor dependent immediate leader or trustee. They are mostly the so-called ‘Public’ places like public-toilets, public-playgrounds, and public-beaches. No team can be formed as these places are open to any, like no-man-land. Achieving CSL objectives at these entities depends on the discipline of the public or the users.
Clean Sri Lanka suffers the absence of drivers in the second and third types of entities, as the appointed persons are not trustees but temporary custodians.
The writer proposes a remedy to the last two types of entities based on the theory of pSE explained below.
Psychoactive Environment (pSE) –
The Power of Customer Attraction
Research by the writer introduced the Psychoactive Environment (pSE) concept to explain why some businesses attract more customers than others who provide the same service. Presented at the 5th Global Conference on Business and Economics at Cambridge University in 2006, the study revealed that a “vibe” influences customer attraction. This vibe, termed pSE, depends on Three Distinct Elements, which can either attract or repel customers. A positive pSE makes a business more attractive and welcoming. This concept can help develop Drivers for Type II and III entities.
pSE is not an all-inclusive solution for CSL, but it lays the foundation for building Drivers and motivating entities to keep entrants attractive and contented.
The structure of the pSE
The three distinct Elements are the Occupants, Systems, and Environment responsible for making a pSE attractive to any entity, be it a person, institution, organization, or county. Each of these elements bears three qualities named Captivators. These captivators are, in simple terms, Intelligent, Nice, and Active in their adjective forms.
pSE theorizes that if any element fails to captivate the entrant’s mood by not being Intelligent, Nice, or Active, the pSE becomes negative, repelling the entrant (customer). Conversely, the positive pSE attracts the entrants if the elements are Intelligent, Nice, and Active.
For example, think person who comes to a Government Office for some service. He sees that the employees, service, and environment are intelligent, nice, and active, and he will be delighted and contented. He will not get frustrated or have any deterioration in national productivity.
The Significance of pSE in CSL
The Elements and the Captivators are universal for any entity. Any entity can easily find its path to Evolution or Progress determined by these elements and captivators. The intangible broader objectives can be downsised to manageable targets by pSE. Achievements of these targets make the entrants happy and enhance productivity – the expectation of Clean Sri Lanka (CSL).
From the perspective of pSE, now we can redefine the Clean Sri Lanka project thus:
To make the Elements of every entity in Sri Lanka: intelligent, Nice, and Active.
How Would the pSE be A Remedy for The Sporadic Hiccups?
We have seen two possible reasons for sporadic setbacks and the discontinuity of some projects launched by the CSL. They are:
The absence of involuntary Drivers for evolvement or progress
Poor attitudes and behaviors of people and leaders
Remedy for the Absence of Drivers
Setting up a system to measure customer or beneficiary satisfaction, and setting aims can build Drivers. The East London NHS principles help build the Aims that drive type II & II entities. The system must be designed to ensure continual improvement following the Deming Cycle. This strategy will create Drivers for Type I & II entities.
This process is too long to explain here therefore we refrain from detailing.
Attitudinal Change
The most difficult task is the attitudinal and behavioural change. Yet it cannot be postponed.
Punishment as a strategy
In developed countries, we see that people are much more disciplined than in the developing countries. We in developing countries, give credit to their superior culture, mitigating ours as rudimental. The long experience and looking at this affair from a vantage point, one will understand it is not the absolute truth. Their ruthless wars in the past, rules, and severe punishment are the reasons behind this discipline. For example, anyone who fails to wear a car seatbelt properly will be fined 400 AUD, nearly 80,000 LKR!
The lesson we can learn is, that in Sri Lanka, we need strong laws and strict punishment together with a type of strategic education as follows.
Psychological Approach as a Strategy
The psychological theory of attitude formation can be used successfully if some good programmes can be designed.
All attitude formations start with life experience. Formed wrong or negative attitudes can be reversed or instilled with correct attitudes by exposure to designed life experiences. The programmes have been developed using the concepts of Hoshin Kanri, Brainstorming, Cause-and-Effect analysis, and Teamwork, in addition to London NTS Quality Improvement strategies.
The experience and good responses we received for our pSE programs conducted at several institutions prove and have built confidence in our approach. However, it was a time, when governments or organisations did not pay much attention to cultural change as CSL expects in the country.
Therefore, we believe this is a golden opportunity to take the CSL supported by the pSE concept.
Although they are visually impaired youngsters, under the guidance of renowned musician Melantha Perera, these talented individuals do shine bright … hence the name Bright Light.
Says Melantha: “My primary mission is to nurture their talent and ensure their sustainable growth in music, and I’m thrilled to announce that Bright Light’s first public performance is scheduled for 7th June, 2025. The venue will be the MJF Centre Auditorium in Katubadda, Moratuwa.”
Melantha went on to say that two years of teaching, online, visually impaired youngsters, from various parts of the island, wasn’t an easy ride.
There were many ups and downs but Melantha’s determination has paid off with the forming of Bright Light, and now they are gearing up to go on stage.
According to Melantha, they have come a long way in music.
“For the past few months, we have been meeting, physically, where I guide them to play as a band and now they show a very keen interest as they are getting to the depth of it. They were not exposed to English songs, but I’ve added a few English songs to widen their repertoire.
Melantha Perera: Invented a notation
system for the guitar
“On 7th June, we are opening up for the public to come and witness their talents, and I want to take this product island-wide, giving the message that we can do it, and I’m hoping to create a database so there will be a following. Initially, we would like your support by attending the show.”
Melantha says he didn’t know what he was getting into but he had confidence teaching anyone music since he has been in the scene for the past 45 years. He began teaching in 2015,
“When I opened my music school, Riversheen School of Music, the most challenging part of teaching was correcting tone deaf which is the theoretical term for those who can’t pitch a note, and also teaching students to keep timing while they sang and played.”
Melantha has even invented a notation system for the guitar which he has named ‘MelaNota’. He has received copyrights from the USA and ISO from Australia, but is yet to be recognised in Sri Lanka.
During Covid-19, Melantha showcased MelaNota online and then it was officially launched with the late Desmond De Silva playing one of his tunes, using MelaNota.
Melantha says that anyone, including the visually impaired, can play a simple melody on a guitar, within five minutes, using his notation system.
“I’ve completed the system and I’m now finalising the syllabus for the notation system.”
Melantha has written not only for the guitar, but also for drums, keyboards, and wind instruments.
For any queries, or additional information, you could contact Melantha at 071 454 4092 or via email at thebandbrightlight@gmail.com.
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