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.