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President tells community based organisations:
We had faith in village community
When implementing our development plans we had faith that the village
community would be able to give us the facts about what the needs of the
community were and what resources were available and how the expenditure
could be managed without spending unnecessarily, President Mahinda
Rajapaksa said.
He was addressing representatives of community based organizations of
the Southern Province at Madamulana on Thursday. �We also sought to
bring development that was confined to Colombo and a few urban areas to
the village as we wished to have an equitable development reaching the
people of the rural areas,� he said.
The President said all governments in the past had made efforts to
address the water shortage problem in the South but they had not been
successful but since we looked to the village community to suggest their
own project proposal for the local water supply schemes we had been able
to implement these successfully.
�I would like to express my thanks to Urban Development Minister
Dinesh Gunawardena for arranging to meet the representative of the
community based organizations,� he said.
�A large number of development projects were implemented and more are
being implemented in the Southern Province.
Hospitals, schools and educational institutions are among the
development projects of the South and we were able to see a grade five
student of Hambantota scoring the highest marks in the national
scholarship examination,� President Rajapaksa said.
�We were able to eradicate the evil of terrorism that plagued the
nation. But it is very important for us to remember that we liberated
the country.
As you are aware King Dutugemunu liberated the country thousands of
years back but our people still remember it. Therefore we should not
forget that the our armed forces liberated the country from terrorism,�
the President said.
�We were also able to implement mega development projects as well as
infrastructure development projects while we were fighting the war
against terrorism.
In the past one had to spend 6 to 7 hours to come from Ampara to
Galle but today the journey now takes only three and a half hours. That
was how the road network was developed by the present Government he
noted. |
