Reawakening the village: bringing back prosperity

It is evidently clear that Sri Lanka is predominantly rural. This is well borne out by statistics; 77% of our population lives in rural areas. It is in the villages that everything productive happened in the good old days.

Historically too, it is our villages that bore the brunt of our development effort and naturally that is where our prosperity lay. Anyone reading the history of Sri Lanka will surely come across words that signify our inalienable relationship with our villages. The words such as “gam, danaw” clearly signify that it is the village that was central in our thinking.

As urbanisation takes place the village is being forgotten. Also, there is an attempt to degrade the village and the rural way of life. Most city folk would say a villager is illiterate, uncouth, shabbily dressed and therefore uncivilised. But, it is the opposite that is true.

The value system in the village was such that villagers upheld moral values sacrosanct. In fact, it is the rural value set that formed the bedrock of our civilisation, of which we are proud to date.

Over the last six decades, since our independence, unfortunately, we have been travelling on the road towards rapid urbanisation leading to squalid living conditions for most, particularly the poor. Most people want to migrate to urban areas but do not understand what they are heading for.

On top of the urbanisation that takes place, the effort to revive the village and reawaken its sanctimonious way of life meets with heavy resistance from those who do not understand the value system and the strength of the good old village.

In overt and covert ways, the village is being trampled by various individuals and organisations. Overt way is to deprive assistance to improve the villages, whilst concentrating on urban areas as some leaders have demonstrated, and covert way of destroying rural life is to introduce degrading habits such as alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs and other such vices.

Fortunately, there is a sense of revival and a feeling of reawakening of the 25,000 odd villages in the country. It is salutary that the Government at last has thought it fit to harness most of its resources towards the revival of the rural way of life.

Most right thinking people applaud it, and we are not surprised a Government led by a leader, whose roots are deeply seated in the rural way of life, wants to go back to the village to achieve ultimate prosperity. Programmes such as “Mathata Thitha” are ample testimony to the effort of the leadership to protect the villager from external evils.

Gama Neguma, the rural reawakening programme envisages a holistic development of the entire village. This, we see, as an unprecedented move in the annals of the rural development movement of our country.

Hitherto, various Governments had different types of rural development movements in the form of building various rural infrastructures, such as a school building, an anicut, rural market place or an agricultural road. But these efforts were just one off activities scattered over a wide area, thus making the impact minimal.

Some villages received assistance while others which also deserved never had that luck. Even today, there are villages that have been neglected for decades.

The Gama Neguma, on the other hand, envisages developing villages in a holistic way so that a village in its entirety will be developed and its inhabitants also cared for. This is where Gama Neguma becomes a unique programme bringing together the entire Government towards the uplift of the village.

It is also pleasantly surprising that Gama Neguma not only attempts to upgrade the physical infrastructure, but also focuses on the villager, an entity hitherto almost taken for granted, when in fact the human development aspect should have been the focus.

Concurrently with infrastructure improvement, people are being focused upon so that an improvement in the quality of their life is aimed at. This is again a very novel feature where over a period of time, 12,000 villages would be revived and lives of those who live in them uplifted and a new lease of life given to them to face the future.

Small and medium scale enterprises are being encouraged to move into rural areas enabling rural youth to gain employment, science and technology is being taken to grass roots levels to improve whatever industries that are currently installed, and above all globally accepted information is provided to rural folk to improve their way of life.

All this is well and good. How well would this be implemented is what the country eagerly awaits. The President, being a son of the rural soil, does understand the rural way of life, the beauty that has made his childhood pleasant and the rural environment in which he grew that has had an impact on his political life.

It is the rural influence that has inculcated in him the ways endearing him to people of all walks of life. Will his thinking and his understanding of the rural way of life percolate down to those who are implementing different aspects of this unique initiative?

Most leaders have been unable to push down their thinking to those who are charged with implementing their policies. We hopefully wait to see the President’s style of working that is very practical and pragmatic, to tackle this age old issue of weak implementation.

It will be to his credit and the whole nation would be grateful to him, if he steers this process through the Ministry of Nation Building and Rural Infrastructure to bring back the prosperity that our rural environments continuously and consistently enjoyed in glorious past.

One also is happy to see that the concept of public vigilance committees is being mooted. However, the impetus seems insufficient to make an impact. What improvement needs to be done in the village must have the approval and the sanction of those who benefit out of it.

Therefore, ideas and plans must emanate from the villagers themselves. As much as the Gama Neguma programme has emanated from the hearts and minds of the rural peasants, what is implemented and how this is implemented must also receive their attention.

That is why Public Vigilance Committees must keep a vigil over construction of roads and other infrastructure, to ensure that there is no pilferage of materials, that there is quality work done and also that time schedules are maintained.

This noble effort of the President and his government to improve and enhance the quality of the rural peasantry should not be allowed to suffer the usual fate of most of our rural initiatives.

Down the line, if the resources are siphoned off by various unscrupulous elements, both grass roots level public officials and politicians and through them the urban contractors, then this time too we will end up with the same old story of spent resources and nothing much to see.

The country cannot afford to lose this opportunity since one does not know when again Sri Lanka would be able to initiate a programme of this magnitude and extent, and rural folks who are to benefit out of this unique programme must work tirelessly to defeat the multi-faceted obstructions that sustainable development efforts have to face.

Development, it is said, will almost destroy rural tranquillity. In preserving rural sanctity, we must not be confused with modernisation and westernisation. Westernisation is not what we should embrace; in fact, it has ruined our way of life, the culture, the traditions and all what we stand for.

Modernisation, on the other hand, is to embrace new ways of doing things effectively and efficiently. Modernisation without doubt will not destroy the rural environment and denigrate the level of tranquillity in a village.

Whilst modernisation such as the introduction of the ‘Nenasala’ or the e-library will open up huge vistas for children and adults, western ways of life such as junk food and innumerable pollutants if introduced to rural life, will destroy the very fabric of the rural society. Gama Neguma, we presume, will take into account the harmful effects of westernisation and protect rural life.

It might even be more difficult than the upgrading and building of rural physical infrastructure.

There is also the notion that villagers are poor. This may be true to an extent, but unlike the urban cities, the rural environments do not make people poor; in fact, with the right guidance it is the rural folk that can easily become prosperous with the abundance of natural resources at the grass roots level. Successive Governments have worked tirelessly to alleviate poverty.

Yet, we have not been able to substantially reduce the poverty level of our country. On the one hand, the statistics may not portray the true nature of poverty in Sri Lanka as many of those who receive public assistance have appreciable incomes to be labelled as above poverty levels. Be that as it may, the rural development initiatives must focus on improving people’s quality of life in which process poverty too should be reduced.

The Gama Neguma initiative of the Government, as we understand, will address this most important issue of improving the life of the inhabitant of the village.

There is much hope in the hearts and minds of the rural folk that at last the Government has taken a bold initiative to improve their lives. However, if this were to fail, once again, Sri Lanka’s rural population will fall into the abyss of misery out of which they will never be able to resurrect themselves. That must be avoided somehow and that is where true leadership will be most critical.