The Mahaweli Project and the Food Production Drive

(Excerpted from Rendering Unto Caesar
by Bradman Weerakoon)

The Mahaweli Diversion Project was a dream on which Dudley (Senanayake) had spent many hours of labour. His planners had broken it down into five or six major projects with dams and electricity generating stations below them at selected points on the Mahaweli ganga as it came down from the hills in a north-easterly direction to enter the sea near Trincomalee. It had enormous potential. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of land would be opened up for new cultivation, while many reservoirs on the way, would have their water supplemented.

The hydropower generation capacity was similarly very large. The plan was to raise capacity about two-fold when Mahaweli was completed. Some were talking about exporting the excess power to India. Since there did not appear to be any easy method of mobilizing the enormous resources required, the project was designed to take 30 years for final completion. It would have fulfilled the Senanayake (both D S and Dudley shared it) vision of a country where the symbols of the dagoba (Buddhism) and the wewa (irrigation) complemented each other in ensuring growth and a life of freedom and prosperity to the farming community.

King Parakramabahu’s famous saying, “Let not a drop of water that falls on my land flow into the sea without being of benefit to man,” which Dudley often spoke about and referred to at public meetings, he thought, would be achieved to a great extent through the Mahaweli ganga project.

I recall a grand ballet involving hundreds of dancers being composed on the theme of the Mahaweli project and taken as part of the information department’s publicity to many parts of the country. The opposition cleverly ridiculed the project as a grandiose scheme which would never see the light of day and called it the Mahaweli ‘diversion’ punning on the idea of diverting the people’s attention from the real problems facing the country, of the cost of living and the Tamil ethnic issue. But Dudley went ahead undeterred by the criticism.

Dudley’s food production drive was a model of how a government programme should be conceived, structured and managed. The objective was clear. The country had to become self-sufficient, or close to it, in the production of food, particularly paddy or rice, the staple food of the people.

He had already dealt with the dangerous issue of the rice subsidy which had caused his resignation from office in 1953. Giving two measures at fifty cents a measure to every person in the country was a terrific burden on the exchequer. So he hit upon an ingenious idea – cut the ration to one measure but give it free. The rest could be bought in the open market at whatever price the consumer could bear.

While the public reaction to this amazing proposition was ambivalent, the opposition railed at it implying that Dudley was up to his usual game of hitting the people in the stomach. Sirimavo, inspired perhaps by the news that Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon, and the moon was very much on people’s minds, promised that when she came back she would restore the stolen second measure even if she had to get rice from the moon.

Dudley used the resultant steep increase in the price of rice as an incentive to paddy farmers to increase their production and launched an intensive ‘grow more food’ campaign. At the time, Ceylon was perhaps seventy per cent towards self-sufficiency in its basic food requirements, particularly rice. The rest was being imported. The country faced a severe foreign exchange crisis and imports were difficult to meet the balance. Many, specially the low-income consumers would have had to do without some items of popular taste or move to substitutes like manioc and yams. Flour might have been made available under the US PL480 and other aid schemes. But Dudley realized that wheat could never be produced in the country, and making the consumer dependent on wheat flour, was not advisable in the long run. There was no other choice but to grow the food, especially rice, ourselves.

Dudley who was a good organizer built the infrastructure base realizing that he had to get energetic and experienced people to lead the food production drive. So, he selected several senior administrators with a good track record in management of projects as government agents, and posted them, not without some protest in view of their seniority, to particularly the major rice producing districts. With these individuals in place, sufficiently backed up by technical personnel, like senior irrigation engineers and agriculture department staff, he used the new technology of the Green Revolution which had gained credibility during this time, to provide the farmers with the seed material, pesticides, fertilizers and marketing chains to go for higher productivity from their holdings.

Most importantly, Dudley gave this his very personal imprint by making it a priority item in the Cabinet agendas and commissioning his secretary in defence and external affairs, G V P Samarasinghe to head a special cabinet sub-committee on Food Production. I was part of the cabinet sub-committee team, and G V P went to work with his customary professionalism. Records of minutes, which I have, indicate that there were 56 such cabinet sub-committee meetings during these five years and the range of issues taken up were staggering.

Dudley himself spent a great deal of time on weekends in the field, exhorting both the bureaucracy and the farmers, to produce more and yet more. Everybody cooperated and some amazing yields were obtained in fields which had up till then been known for only average harvests. One or two of the senior men he had handpicked as government agents were not equal to the task. Once in Batticaloa, on a day full of an impossible schedule of inspections of chilli and minor crop cultivation on the western side of the lagoon, where the culverts were broken and detours on dusty, uneven dirt tracks frequent, Dudley lost his customary cool.

It was seven in the evening, the convoy of vehicles had long since broken up, the Youth Settlement Scheme farmers, who had been standing by for four hours, had dispersed and when we arrived there was not a soul in sight. Dudley, bathed in dust and perspiration and very angry, got out of his jeep and bawled, “Where’s that bloody GA? It was curtains for Kasilingam. Within a week the gentle and often absentminded, western classics scholar was back in the treasury in Colombo.

But there were many successes and spurts in production as a result of the program. Crop yields in paddy increased markedly and this was statistically reflected in the Central Bank Reports for these years as follows:

A novel greetings card

Dudley captured all of this change with a wonderful New Year greetings card which he devised himself, in which he appears as a typical paddy farmer in an amude with a mammoty on his shoulder (as seen in the picture). I do not think that any other leader in the world would have wanted to show himself publicly in this manner.

At the end of each year the prime minister’s office would put up for the PM’s approval several specimens of cards to be sent to his friends and acquaintances here and all over the world conveying the customary greetings and good wishes for the season and the New Year. In 1967, with his food production drive in top gear, Dudley designed his own card illustrating in a very personal way his own involvement in his pet project.

To balance the traditional motif inside, with the world’s evolving technology, the cover of the card showed a photograph of the resplendent island of Lanka taken from the satellite Gemini X1 at a height of 500 miles above the earth.