SRI LANKA: New Homes For Slum Dwellers in a New Colombo

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Mar 12 2001 (IPS) - Sriya Kanthi lives with her family in a two-room shack in the shanty town of Wanathamulla in the Sri Lankan capital.

Wanathamulla is one of the numerous squatter settlements in Colombo, where more than half of the about 800,000 residents live in slum colonies.

Rows and rows of chicken coop-like homes along lanes overflowing with garbage, make up the slum colony. Men, women and children bathe at roadside taps.

“I would love to live in cleaner surroundings,” says Sriya, who works as a tea packer in a tea export company.

Elinta Elizabeth too lives in Wanathamulla, with her family of four people in a tiny hut. Her daughter sleeps at night at her uncle’s home, because Elinta’s house does not have space for four people to sleep.

She wishes she could live in a bigger house.

Their dreams are likely to come true. An ambitious government scheme to beautify Colombo, which was announced by the government in the first week of March, will house tens of thousands of shanty town dwellers in clean, low-cost housing.

“We want to beautify Colombo and make it a pleasant place to live in,” says Urban Development Minister Mangala Samaraweera.

A new urban development plan announced by Samaraweera will not only replace the shanty towns with new high-rise housing for the poor, but move out of Colombo, all government buildings, including the office and home of the head of state.

“We want to liberate Colombo of its rulers,” the minister told reporters. The scheme will be self-financing for it is estimated to free about 3,000 hectares of prime land in the city for commercial development.

The money earned from the sale of this land will be used for developing Sri Jayawardenapura, about 10 km from Colombo. The new township was named the administrative capital of Sri Lanka in the 1980s.

A new parliament building, on an island in an artificial lake with hundreds of varieties of birds, and several government buildings, have already been built in Sri Jayawardenapura.

Samaraweera said once President Chandrika Kumaratunga moves to her new home and office at Sri Jayawardenapura, her present official residence in Colombo would be converted to a state guest house.

The presidential secretariat would be used as a museum and a conference hall for ministers.

According to Krishan Deheragoda, chairman of the Urban Development Authority, the entire plan would cost 40 billion rupees (nearly half a billion U.S. dollars) and take between three to five years to complete.

Some 420,000 shanty town residents like Sriya and Elinta are to be moved into new buildings having electricity, water supply, sanitation and even telephone connections.

In the first phase, 500 housing units are being built in three buildings, each with 10 floors.

Groups of 300 to 500 tenants would be helped to form an owners’ group, with each owner holding one share of 25,000 rupees (294 dollars).

The owners’ groups will buy facilities like electricity and water in bulk and then re-distribute the utilities to tenants. They will also be responsible for maintaining the buildings.

Urban development authority chief Deheragoda believes that the shanty town dwellers can pay this much quite easily because of higher urban incomes of the poor.

However, Vidura Sri Nammuni, former president of the Sri Lanka Architects Association, thinks that the idea is unlikely to work as it has failed in most other parts of the world.

Nammuni says that slum dwellers will not want to move out of Colombo, because most of them work in the city.

He also disapproves of building ‘high rise shanties’. “We should not consider only the bad aspects of shanties. There are also positive aspects,” he says.

“On the one hand we want to move away from living in a concrete jungle and then decide to put these people in boxes on top of each other,” he says, criticising the plan to build 10- storey buildings to house slum dwellers.

The minister has been giving high priority to beautifying Colombo since he took over office in December 2000, when he announced a plan to demolish unauthorised buildings.

Since then, dozens of small shops and buildings have been bulldozed by government demolition units. The owners of these dwellings have held protest marches and on occasion turned to arson, and even threatened self-immolation.