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. |