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Tragic bungling on basics

As a people, Sri Lankans are gifted with a knack of churning out reams and reams of “development plans”. These projects have been the bread and butter of many governments since 1948 but judging by some very basic things we do not seem to be making substantial progress on the road to “development” although development planners continue to spin their plans.

Take, for instance, the horrifying chaos unleashed in the country by yesterday’s early morning stormy weather. Surreal, nightmarish scenes greeted the eye of the traveller as he trudged painfully through a sea of confusion towards his destination.

The weather was certainly inclement and hostile but most highways were inundated and impassable in an instant. Flash floods brought traffic to a grinding halt. Vehicles in some city locations were about two feet deep in water, stalled and abandoned.

With no relief in sight, office workers and other commuters were running helter-skelter. On account of the invading waters, vehicles moved buffer-to-buffer at less than snail’s pace, making traffick congestion more unendurable than usual.

Such were the horrors which were visited on us by a downpour which lasted a few hours. Once again the people were very badly let down by their City Fathers and more particularly their so-called development planners.

They were marooned in a sea of chaos unleashed by the proverbial bungling bureaucrats and smooth-talking development experts, whose dreams of development never seem to be coming true.

Nothing that we are saying about the instant flooding of our towns and metropolis is really revelatory. We have been on this subject umpteen times and the urban planning community has nonchalantly turned a deaf ear on our protests.

Put simply, the issue is this: why haven’t our urban centres been planned better ? Why do showers bring about instant inundating of the city and outlying towns ? Is this the “development” we have been promised over the past decades ?

There is certainly nothing wrong in thinking big. There is absolutely nothing wrong in weaving grandiose development schemes and dreams. However, we need to prove ourselves in things seemingly small, first. We must get our basics right before we handle things complex, great and grand.

Experience teaches us that we must proceed from the small and seemingly trivial to things big and eye-dazzling. In fact if we do not succeed in our fundamentals there is no way in which we could effectively handle those things which are grand.

Therefore, we need to learn to first lay out our urban centres better. If we permit greed and insatiable acquisitiveness to cloud our wisdom and power of reasoning, we are bound to blunder, as we are doing now and very tragically so.

The simple truth about urban development is that we cannot build on just any land. We need to spare those plots of marsh land which could absorb excess rain water and thereby prevent our towns from being flooded. We need to plan our buildings with an aesthetic eye so that man - made structures could blend sublimely with their surroundings.

If the bureaucracy of the land grab and build on every available patch of land we should not be surprised if we are flooded and marooned.

The same result would occur if a blind eye is turned on land grabbers of various kinds and colours.

LTTE infighting in Australia leads to the crackdown

Several fund raising opportunities in England where millions of dollars could have been raised has been lost due to inadequate handling. TRO’s international exhibitions organised by Chandru Pararajasingham spending millions of rupees on advertising and promotional companies have been shelved in summer. According to TRO’s own public statements to the Sri Lanka media a new organisation has been created with the “sister organisations” called ITRO.

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Applicability of the Companies Act to the existing companies

An existing company which is a private company, will continue under the new Act as a private company to which Part II of the new Act applies. An existing company which is an offshore company, will continue under the new Act as an offshore company to which Part XI of the new Act applies

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