Thursday 16th January, 2025

Rising water levels in irrigation tanks are a blessing for the inhabitants of the dry zone, for they signal a time of plenty. Paradoxically, scores of families living in areas below the Senanayake Samudraya in Ampara are living in fear as the life-giving reservoir is fast approaching its maximum storage limit.

More than one hundred people were evacuated the other day because a bank of Gal Oya, in Suduwella and Kotawehera, is at the risk of breaching owing to severe erosion. Irrigation officials warned that if rains continued causing the sluice gates of the tank to be opened, the damaged bank might give way, flooding a vast low-lying area. The evacuees were bussed back home yesterday as the reservoir catchment had not experienced heavy rains the previous day.

Obviously, the erosion of the river bank did not occur overnight, and the residents of the area have said they had been evacuated on previous occasions as well. What have the irrigation authorities and other state officials been doing all these years?

According to some state officials, a sand bar has formed in a section of Gal Oya, making water flow along only one bank, which has suffered erosion as a result. The problem is far too serious to be managed with measures such as piling sandbags, the officials have said, noting that they will have to remove the sand bar, facilitating the river flow and easing the pressure on the damaged bank before repairing it. This task is best left to engineers, but the question is why no action has been taken so far to prevent a possible breach of the eroded bank, which continues to develop cracks. Are the officials waiting until the collapse of the bank to take action? Aren’t cynics justified in calling such individuals NATO (No-Action-Talk-Only) panjandrums?

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Opposition aiming for the stars

The SJB has given serious thought to forming a broad coalition of right-wing political parties as a countervailing force against the JVP-led NPP government, SJB MP S. M. Marikkar has told a media briefing in an answer to a question on the progress in efforts to bring the SJB and the UNP together. Stressing the need for a grand opposition alliance, he has categorised the NPP as a leftist coalition.

Whether a party/coalition is leftist or rightist should be judged by its policies rather than anything else. The NPP cannot be described as a socialist outfit; one sees hardly any difference between its policies and those of the SJB or the UNP. Even JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva has said the NPP administration is not leftist in the real sense of the term. He has, in a press interview, called it ‘a government of leftist, progressive democratic forces’, whatever that means. The Frontline Socialist Party, an offshoot of the JVP, has rightly called the NPP a ‘patchwork of ideological differences’.

The so-called right-wing parties have already begun to cooperate to some extent. They have joined forces to defeat the NPP in cooperative society elections, and achieved some success. Independent groups, backed by the SJB, the UNP, the SLPP and the MEP, have beaten the NPP in Homagama, Moratuwa, Kelaniya, Angunukolapelessa, etc. Their success in those contests may have prompted the SJB to consider forming a grand alliance with a view to turning the tables on the NPP. But the feasibility of such a political project is in doubt, given the competing ambitions of the Opposition politicians.

The SJB has even failed to hold its own coalition partners together; some of them have voted with their feet. The same goes for the SLPP and the UNP. They themselves have suffered crippling splits. So, it is doubtful whether a group of political parties facing internal problems will be able to set aside their differences, overcome the ambitions of their leaders, and unite for a common cause in the long term.