Our irrigation heritage in retrospect

Continued from last week

M U A Tennakoon PhD, DSc Former Executive Director, Central Bank of Sri Lanka and Former Director General, Mahaweli Authority of Sri Lanka

The dry zone irrigation works, both big and small, with their appurtenants, went into decay and disuse under engulfing jungles following the abandonment of them by their beneficiaries who gravitated to the wet zone. Then for more than three centuries after the advent of the Portuguese in 1505, the rulers were preoccupied with internal wars and the wars with foreign invaders- first with the Portuguese and subsequently, with the Dutch and the British.

The dry zone once had a flourishing agricultural civilization internationally tied to the world of comers from both Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa , became a terra incognita. The high levels of irrigation technology which had the capability to construct and maintain large and complex irrigation systems deteriorated and finally lost on its own way. Robert Knox an ‘open-air prisoner’ of the Kandyan King Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe spent twenty years in the 17th century before he finally escaped with his companion Rutland in 1659, was roaming in the north central dry zone in the guise of a petty trader to find out an escape route to the north-western coast of the island has mentioned in his book, An Historical Relations with the Island of Ceylon ,that the larger tanks have so deteriorated enabling the people to have put up their dwellings in the tank beds. In the cases of small village tanks that he saw the farmers used to cut small openings in the tank bunds to get water to their fields little by little. He does not mention about tank water releases from sluices.

Fybus, a Dutch serving the East India Company was on a mission to the Kandyan King in 1762. Disembarking a ship at Kottiyar in the eastern coast, passing through Sungawila, Adampane, Ridduvil, Pangurana, Hathamune Dam, Giritale, Padupaththa in the catchment of the Minneriya Tank, Ehekuluwadiya, Kiri Oya and Nochchikulana to Naula in the Matale District, he has vividly described the poverty and squalor of the drought ridden emaciated villagers in most of those small village settlements at that time in the Tamankaduwa district.

The only redeeming feature in this Dark Age was that those who left the dry zone and gravitated to the hill country, developing anicut-based rice farming in terraced fields. To them there was no need of tanks to store water or irrigation engineers to restore/reconstruct tanks, as rainfall in the hill country was more and distributed over long periods of time. The hill rice farmers have developed very delicate systems in irrigating terraced paddy fields. They were at least barely self- sufficient with cereals and a variety of other non cereal perennial crops, and as such they were able to stubbornly refuse to work as plantation labourers under the British planters which eventually lead to a surreptitious devastation of the irrigation systems in Wellassa and more openly during the Uva Rebellion. We know only a very little of the status of the irrigated agriculture during this Dark Age and as such much research is to be done to clearly know the trials and tribulations in how we lost our marvellous irrigation technology that developed over many centuries prior to the collapse of the Polonnaruwa kingdom.

Period of renaissance

During this period, spanning from about 1850 to 1950, was the Renaissance of irrigation. During the early part of the British administration, from 1796 to about 1850, the British had no particular interest in cereal cultivation. as cheap food cereals could be imported from other colonies nearby. In fact the British held the much needed import of cereals as a trump card amidst subdued local food production, to silence and control the people rebelling against the British. Agriculturally, the British were interested mostly in the cultivation of plantation crops of commercial value, using the local labour and where the local labour was not readily forthcoming as desired, they were preoccupied with bringing indentured South Indian Tamil labourers who solely depended on imported cereal foods to work the plantations, while consolidating their political power in the island.

In the meantime many British explorers, travellers, game hunters, scholar-administrators, both individually and collectively, being keenly bent on exploration of the interior, became more and more inquisitive about the marvels of buried ancient irrigation works. They made studies and made systematic records on what they saw and studied. In fact, it is through their studies and record that we in the twentieth century were able to have a sense of some understanding about the deterioration of our irrigation works during the Dark Age. Forbes, Dawson, Levers and many others were the pioneer enthusiasts of fact finding during the latter half of the nineteenth century. There were many such enthusiasts during the early twentieth century too, such as Codrington, Parker, Wolf, Kennedy and Bell. A few British governors were also keen on exploring and rehabilitating irrigation systems buried in the jungle clad dry zone.

As far as irrigation itself is concerned, Engineer R.S. Kennedy in the 1930s as the Director of Irrigation has made a significant dent in making the British engineering and civil administrative approach towards irrigation administration, for the first time after the establishment of the Irrigation Department in 1900. His 1934 study, Evolution of Scientific Development of village Irrigation Works in the Proceedings of the Engineering Association of Ceylon, published in 1936, is a landmark in irrigation development in Sri Lanka.

While a systematic and genuine interest in scientific development of village irrigation was on, following the vision and the mission of Engineer, J.S. Kennedy, there were also some external and internal forces which lead to a new food policy of the British administration in Sri Lanka. The two World Wars during the first half of the twentieth century making food imports difficult and costly and also the natural increase of population, a genuine interest in local food production began to prevail.

In the 1930s and the 1940s, restoration of major irrigation schemes, beginning of village expansion schemes, establishment of pioneer peasant colonization schemes in the dry zone came into the forefront of irrigation development because there was a patriotic political clamour for it and at the same time regular food imports were becoming increasingly difficult and costly, notably during the Second World War. Hence, irrigated rice farming had to be placed high in the development agenda since then.

Post Independent (modern) era

The immediate pre-independent period’s irrigation efforts were largely spearheaded by the then Minister of Agriculture. D.S. Senanayake who later became the Prime Minister, continued with vigour during the post independent era which are well known and need no elaboration. However, for the record purposes the following are briefly referred to. The colonization scheme commenced prior to the Independence (e.g. Minneriya colonization scheme), village expansion schemes, restoration of minor tanks etc., were continued. New multi-purpose river valley development schemes such as the Gal Oya Development scheme and the Uda walawe Scheme commenced. More importantly; after about a decade’s protracted discussions and planning the Mahaweli Development scheme commenced during the early 1970s and it continued to the present day with several on-the-way changes and modifications covering nearly a fifth of the total land area of the country and still modifications are contemplated after ending a 25-year old civil war in 2009. Development of irrigation activities in the war ravaged North and East is also under active consideration at present. In all these, effective water management remains a daunting task.

Though we often blame the British Administration for some of the development ills continued to the post-independent era, it is to be acknowledged that, the British gave us a very systematic procedure of regular record keeping to facilitate the management tasks including that of irrigated agriculture. For every village in the dry zone the British administration maintained a separate file called Village Final Plans (FVPP) with properly surveyed maps including farm plots prepared during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and information about village resources. The village resource profile gave the village boundaries, tank extent and its storage capacity at spill level, extent of irrigable paddy lands in its command area, extents cultivated during the two main cultivation seasons, paddy varieties and their average yield, extents of forest and waste lands, chena extents estimated as cultivated annually, numbers of houses and families in the village’ male and female population separately and even the cattle population separately as buffaloes and neat cattle also separately. These files were regularly updated. Every Kachcheri has deposited these village files in its Record Room for ready reference for administrative purposes. They were kept intact, till the late 1950s.

Since the 1960s, the significance given to these Record Rooms waned rapidly and today these Record Rooms are in chaotic situations and locating a requisite document in a Record Room amounts to a nightmare. Furthermore, towards the tail end of the 20th century Ministries and Departments within their purview increased rapidly and some of those valuable documents were taken hither and thither by the claimant departments making it unable for a one to easily know where they are.

The day to day records ‘kept’ by the present subject officers, which was impressively perfect and the British administration fostering the preparation of systematic periodic reports (monthly, quarterly, biannually and annually) for administrative purposes, too has gone haywire. During the time of British administration the files and periodical reports were properly folioed or page numbered and indexed. These simple but effective record keeping is not followed now. Thus, from a decade or two from now we may face an another Dark Age of administrative information shortage. Therefore, an immediate systematization of record keeping and their safe keeping are of urgent necessities.

Strategies for a comprehensive study

In the foregoing it is evident that we own a proud hydraulic civilization more than 25 centuries old, which collapsed halfway after the 13th century and it was in the doldrums for another 6 centuries to start its revival in the late 19th century. Whether we like it or not, we need to admit that the British personnel in the late 19th century and in the early 20th century, have done more than what we did to make comprehensive studies on our hydraulic civilization. It is true that some individual scholars have done some worthwhile studies, but what we need is a comprehensive national level study.

Concluded