MATTALA TAKES-OFF

An A-380 airbus is no small vessel. But one of those big-birds being able to land in a brand new airport in the hitherto relatively underdeveloped deep South of the country, is no mean feat.

Mattla airport is a gargantuan but also symbolic achievement. It signals an entry into a brave new world, after years of a slow and stagnant economy, tweaked only by some temporary lulls in a long-running debilitating conflict.

The project will be declared open shortly, but national newspaper editors and other media heads were taken on a guided tour this week. Mattala certainly does not seem to be a mere airport project, that is about Embarkation, Disembarkation and Customs.

The endeavour is coordinated for an entire half of the country to take wing, with the airport being the central pivot for the productive networking of many other enterprises such as an IT park, a botanical-garden and a transshipment hub.

Tourists can be flown to their resort towns, Maldives style, and if they prefer it that way, never see Colombo.

The implications of that are bound to make the ever baying and barking columnists want to eat their words whole. One forever frothing member of this species of scribes -- who calls himself a leftist incidentally -- was recently complaining about Mattla airport being too costly and therefore a waste of expenditure that would, as these people keep on saying as if by rote, 'mire the country in debt.'

Infrastructure projects of this order can never be reduced to rupees and cents calculations on the basis of a fat construction budget.

That would be in a rough comparison much like saying it costs a fortune to educate a child, which makes schooling a worthless pursuit.

The Mattala airport will open the skies for an influx of tourist traffic as well as for a range of other projects that will piggyback on the inevitable domino development that would happen around the Mattala environs.

Doors have to be opened for economic uplift, floodgate style. People make collective forays into a brave new world in quantum leaps, not in snails pace incremental strides. This has been the experience of all regional and global economic powerhouses.

Holes can be picked in any project, and when the telephone was invented, the Master of Patents at that time is supposed to have commented that it will be an interesting toy, but will not have any commercial viability due to the general uselessness of the invention! Edison is said to have met with much the same reaction from the part of the 'experts', on his invention of the light-bulb.

Dogs may bark, but the caravan must move on, and the aircraft must reach for the skies. Sri Lanka's economy has passed take off point, and is now on cruise. There were some false starts before, notably when J. R. Jayewardene opened liberalized trade, but the leadership of that time was unable to keep social unrest under a lid, and paid the price.

The economy that took off under Jayewardene abruptly crash landed. There are many who want to crash-land the economy again now, by force - and by yanking the aircraft out of the sky as it were, and if possible, flattening the airport!

Since they cannot do that, they end up with endless cavils written out in otherwise unused newspaper spaces. Apparently, some of the newspaper people who were invited to see the Mattala airport project get off the ground did not want to take up the invitation. They had 'other preoccupations.'

But there will be no doubt that when it comes to carping time, they and their newspapers will be in the forefront, picking holes in the Mattala project, even though they didn't want to come and see it for themselves. This is true-to-form incurable cynicism -- in fact, its not cynicism, it is, as a matter of fact, simple cussedness. But good men and good projects cannot be kept down, certainly not by unproductive rumour mongers and self-destructing pen pushers.