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| Wednesday, 13 October 2004 |
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The not-in-my-backyard syndrome
Nobody wants his or her backyard sullied or dirtied. (That is why urban Sri Lankans dump their household garbage outside their front gates). Anyway let's not digress from the issue. Our backyards are important places and we all want them clean. And so we would oppose and object to any activity, especially by a neighbour, that would create chaos in our backyards. This idea is applied on a larger scale to projects, and the immediate neighbourhood of the project site. Almost all large development projects have been subjected to at varied levels to the NIMBY syndrome. The neighbourhood protests- Not In My Backyard. So projects are delayed, denied and relocated only to have fresh NIMBY protests. The NIMBY syndrome arises out of fear of the changes that are brought upon a landscape through a project. Take the coal power plant for instance. Its location has shifted at least twice but at each point the people of the area do not want it there, fearing the consequences of a large coal fired power plant. People continue to protest despite elaborate EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) reports that spell out high tech measures that will guarantee low emissions and little pollution. This is an extended version of the Syndrome that happens in countries like ours (in other South Asian countries as well) because people are not willing to believe the official version of facts. In most countries, the public is suspicious of large corporates and private investors. In Sri Lanka, the public is more likely to believe the word of investors than the state bureaucracy. This is a sad indictment upon the way the state machinery has worked all these years. The public was never consulted on issues and projects that affected their homes, their livelihoods and their village. People were left out of the decision-making. There are poignant episodes of people becoming aware of highway projects when the surveyors come to tag their homes. Of late, in token efforts to factor in the views of 'affected populations' certain state departments have taken to disguising fact with fiction and sugar-coating the effects so that the people will not fear consequences. Others have disguised themselves entirely in order to gain access to areas where people are agitated over a coming project. One department is even known to have got compensation claims signed by unsuspecting and largely illiterate residents by disguising the documents as socio-economic surveys and such. Such deviousness has only painted a black image of the intentions of these institutions. The public does not want to believe any of it anymore. When the public is told that a solid waste landfill in their neighbourhood is going to be 'sanitary' and will not look anything like the open dumps that urban Sri Lankans are used to- they shake their heads and say 'oh no, we don't believe that.' And this attitude has stalled, delayed or totally stopped many projects that would have been important for the country. Examples are many, but a few stand out. The coal-fired power plant is one such. The project is being rejected at all its chosen sites like an unwanted child, the country was deprived of much needed megawatts of electricity. Today, we are burning high-polluting and high-cost diesel for electricity instead, with the threat of power shortages during the dry season. The Colombo-Katunayake expressway is another. When donor funding was in hand, there were severe NIMBY-style protests and the funding disappeared. Today a half built road sullies the Muthurajawela and the traffic problem on the Airport road is almost at crisis proportions. |
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Produced by Lake House |
by Tharuka Dissanaike
