{"id":87450,"date":"2013-05-19T00:11:38","date_gmt":"2013-05-18T18:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=87450"},"modified":"2013-05-23T18:41:44","modified_gmt":"2013-05-23T13:11:44","slug":"rural-realities-notwithstanding-negumas-of-all-kinds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/rural-realities-notwithstanding-negumas-of-all-kinds\/","title":{"rendered":"Rural Realities Notwithstanding “Negumas” Of All Kinds"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Emil van der Poorten<\/a><\/span>\u00a0–<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Emil van der Poorten<\/p><\/div>\n

I have, over several years past and in a variety of English-language publications, referred to the chaos and hypocrisy that faces anyone attempting to earn anything approaching a living or seeking to supplement one\u2019s daily bread in the mid-country of Sri Lanka<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

Recently a classmate from my days at Trinity from nearly sixty years ago, Cecil Dharmasena, wrote, in The Island newspaper, two very lucid descriptions of the chaos that passes for administration in what used to be the Department of Agriculture with reference, specifically to that scourge of the lowlands, Chronic Kidney Disease and another piece on a) the lack of any extension services to the small farmer and b) the hugely detrimental effect of the lack of any rational purchasing system for crops grown in one or both of the cultivation seasons.\u00a0 I really don\u2019t know whether \u201cchaotic\u201d would be the word to describe what comes out of a vacuum, but I\u2019ll leave that differentiation to someone better versed in such semantics.<\/p>\n

While, ideally, this piece should be read alongside those of Mr. Dharmasena, let me attempt to deal with what has been my experience and that of those who live in rural Sri Lanka in this particular neck of the woods, seeking to supplement what Cecil says rather than repeat any of it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It seems that none of the local \u201cdevelopment drives\u201d amount to much more than tamashas<\/em> to fete local politicians, their acolytes and visiting \u201cdignitaries\u201d and are conducted at significant expense with no return on such efforts except in the matter of boosting the egos of the organizers and their hangers-on.<\/p>\n

Not so long ago, all the agricultural workers, both resident on estates in the area and in the informal \u201ccolonies\u201d (originally squatter settlements on abandoned state-owned and administered estates), took the day off (without pay). \u00a0Why?\u00a0 Because the local authority, with politicos of varies levels in attendance, were to distribute mosquito nets treated with insect repellent.\u00a0 To cut a long story short, literally dozens of men and women spent the whole day at a designated location waiting for the nets to arrive, only to be told that the man who had the key to the room in which they were stored wasn\u2019t available to unlock that storage!\u00a0 In all fairness, a subsequent journey to the location resulted in the man (and key) being available to deliver the nets to those assembled.\u00a0 What a whole day\u2019s lost earnings mean to people barely eking out an existence can well be imagined.\u00a0 Ah well, there\u2019s no free lunch (or mosquito nets), for the poor and non-politicians, at least!<\/p>\n

A while later, I find a three-wheeler parked at the foot of the Sal <\/em>tree at our gate.\u00a0 Three well-dressed individuals are in the process of alighting from it, two females and a male.\u00a0 The male, it transpires, is an employee of the Pradeshiya Sabhawa<\/a><\/span> or District Administration Office, is the owner-operator of the 3-wheeler and is, with the two dressed-for-office ladies, on a mission to encourage local residents to grow vegetables.\u00a0 They come armed with a few home-garden size packets of seeds and have had some difficulty finding \u201cthe natives\u201d and delivering the seeds and their message of the need for greater productivity.\u00a0 The reason for this is fairly obvious: the \u201clocals\u201d who are productive are employed away from their homes and those they find at home are the parasitic layabouts who, basically, live off their more productive relations, generally a parent or parents, and have no desire to do anything except, maybe, look for their next drink of kasippu or what can be stolen from a neighbour!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In a pleasant and informal discussion with what could pass for \u201cagricultural extension officers\u201d in the current set-up, it is apparent that they are totally unaware of the fact that residents of the area have given up trying to grow anything considered edible by the monkeys, wild pigs, porcupine, and the giant, flying and palm squirrels in the area.\u00a0 This means that anything growing above or below ground is subject to the depredations of these vermin, the control of which is not paid the slightest attention by those promoting food production of one description or another.\u00a0 An illustration would not be out of place here.\u00a0 When I offered plantain suckers to the locals at no charge, the response was a deafening \u201cNyet\u201d accompanied by the rhetorical question, \u201cWhy would we want to grow things by the sweat of our brow purely to meet the dietary requirements of our simian, rodent and porcine neighbours?\u201d\u00a0 Given rural economics in the mid-country of Sri Lanka, this is hardly a matter for any measure of jocularity, though, because these peasants and their forbears, long before employment as wage-slaves in the middle east was an option, supplemented whatever wage they earned with produce from their home gardens and their fruit and other trees.\u00a0 This kind of \u201csupplementation\u201d had a significant impact on their budgets.\u00a0 Today, they are reduced to buying jak fruit at a vegetable stall in a local town because the monkeys strip the trees in their yards bare and they don\u2019t even bother to grow anything like beans or other garden vegetables because none of that is free from the attention of these and other vermin.<\/p>\n

On one occasion, when I spoke to a senior Grama Niladhari who is an avid supporter of the various \u201cNegumas<\/a><\/span>,\u201d he said there were plans to deliver monkey traps to deal with that pest.\u00a0 However, the logistics of trapping monkeys, having them re-located etc. etc. had not even been considered.\u00a0 And rightly so, because no one seemed to know where the monkey traps were and how they were to be obtained.\u00a0 My rural neighbours treated this \u201csolution\u201d with the contempt it deserved.\u00a0 As a footnote to the \u201ctrap project,\u201d a while after the initial excitement, I was told that a monkey trap had been dropped off at an office in a neighbouring jurisdiction, that it was in need of major repairs to be made operational, that those repairs were not affected and that, after sitting around for some months, it was removed by whoever brought it there in the first place!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I have previously referred to the havoc that the so-called \u201cland reform\u201d of the late Hector Kobbekaduwa<\/a><\/span> has wreaked on our neighbourhoods.\u00a0 Agriculturally-productive land has ended up as vast savannahs of that abomination, guinea grass, which was originally introduced as cattle fodder but has ended up an ecological disaster and an intrusive nuisance of monumental proportions in the absence of ANYTHING that will consume it.\u00a0 Of course, when I was visiting what used to be (40 years ago) the highest-yielding coconut estate in the Kurunegala district for another purpose, I was informed that they were expecting a herd of high-yielding Australian dairy cows to graze under the coconut trees.\u00a0 When I inquired where the fodder for these bovines was going to come from since the ground under the coconut trees had nary a blade of grass or other vegetation, \u00a0I was told, \u201cOh! We will grow some grass.\u201d\u00a0 One would have thought that in the import of exotic, expensive dairy cattle the need for fodder grass would have been factored in.\u00a0 However, this was obviously not the case in our Paradise Isle where the commission on the purchase of the cows was probably the single most important element of this particular \u201cdairy enterprise.\u201d If I hadn\u2019t hear this story from the horse\u2019s mouth, so to speak, I would have accused them of trying to compete with Baron Munchausen.\u00a0 However, as they say in dear old Sri Lanka, \u201cI heard it with my own ears!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>As for the \u201cNeguma\u201d related to the supply of electricity, that utility only became a reality in our neighbourhood because the \u201clocals\u201d cleared the entire path for the power line and carried the power poles to their locations beyond the transformer.\u00a0 Thereafter, the supply has been so erratic that the standard practice is to keep a small flashlight in one\u2019s pocket so that you are not stranded in the dark whenever the lights go out!<\/p>\n

Two Sundays before today, the local residents banded together to make a part of our road motorable \u00a0again because all those providing transport up the hill were threatening yet another hike in their already astronomically-high rates for transporting people and goods up or down the 2 kilometres of road that are used by the local Pradeshiya Sabhawa and abused six times a day by its tractor hauling garbage to a completely illegal dump situated outside its jurisdiction.\u00a0 Needless to add that local authority does ABSOLUTELY NO MAINTENANCE on that road, despite promises, spread over ten years, that \u201csoon, we\u2019ll repair the road!\u201d\u00a0 In most parts of the civilized world, citizens doing anything to public roads would probably be considered targets for criminal prosecution.\u00a0 In rural Sri Lanka, at least, such \u201ccriminal\u201d conduct is a necessary for survival!<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take a rocket scientist to guess that much of what is being done by volunteer labour is clearly within the responsibility of the various levels of government.\u00a0 However, as someone once said, \u201cWhen you are up to your arse in alligators, it\u2019s tough to think of draining the swamp.\u201d\u00a0 That said, how long do those living in the hinterlands of the country have to perform the tasks for which budgetary allocations exist in the various levels of government, particularly when the money that should be spent to provide ESSENTIAL services to the citizenry is being drained into the pockets of politicians and their acolytes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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