ENVIRONMENT-SRI LANKA: Govt. Neglecting Drought – Report

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jan 22 2001 (IPS) - When social researchers asked people in a remote village of southern Sri Lanka what they needed most, they expected to be told about jobs and schools.

But they were surprised when the village women said their biggest need was big water barrels.

The hamlet of Andarawewa in the arid Hambantota district was in the midst of a severe water shortage and locals did not have enough vessels to store the daily supply, collected from a government water tanker and far away wells.

“We were surprised by the response. We had expected the women to ask for what we thought were basic necessities but their answer gave us an insight into how serious the water problem is in some villages,” says Madhavi Ariyabandu of the International Technology Development Group (ITDG), which conducted the survey.

The survey also found that Andarawewa had several traditional water tanks that had not been used for years. The village would not have faced a water shortage, if these rain water collection stores were in use.

“I would think we have enough water resources to feed our people but the country lacks proper management of these resources,” says Rajendra Ariyabandu, head of irrigation and water management at the state-funded Agrarian Research and Training Institute.

Revival of traditional rain water harvesting methods is one of the suggestions made by the report prepared by the Colombo office of the ITDG for a meeting of government officials, experts and people’s groups to be held here in March.

The study is part of an initiative by the South Asian Disaster Mitigation Network, ‘Duryog Nivaran’. Similar studies are being conducted in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

While another study on landslides is being carried out in Sri Lanka, the Bangladesh survey will study floods, river erosion and arsenic contamination of drinking water.

Drought, floods and cyclones in India, landslides and floods in Nepal and droughts and floods in Pakistan, will be investigated by the other country reports.

Natural disasters are estimated to have killed some 24,286 people in South Asia annually between the years 1990 and 1998, according to the U.N.-sponsored World Disaster Report 2000.

The U.N. report noted that every year, an average of 45 million people were affected by disasters during the same period in the region, which is home to nearly 1.5 billion people.

India is the most vulnerable to droughts, but even tropical Sri Lanka has faced severe water scarcities in the past 30 years, notes the ITDG survey. The Indian Ocean island nation of about 19 million people, faced its worst drought in the year 1988, which affected some 650,000 households.

Another 100,000 families faced a water shortage four years ago. Droughts kill, by not only starving people of water, but causing food shortages and disease.

Sri Lanka gets an average of about 2,400 millimetres of rain annually. But 60 percent of this runs down to the sea.

“One of our best and most practical solutions is to harvest rainwater and retain it as an year-long resource. But that is not happening because of poor management of rainwater resources,” says Ariyabandu of the state agrarian research institute.

Reviving the country’s ancient water tanks, which have been ruined by decades of neglect, can be one of the most effective answers to the growing water shortage, he adds.

The farms of Andarawewa could become more productive if the old water tanks were used again. The village grows rice and other crops, but less than 15 percent of the cultivatable land is used during the non-rain months.

“If we could raise this usage to at least 50 or 60 percent, that would have a major impact on rural Sri Lanka and improve the income levels of those people,” says Ariyabandu.

The drought-proofing measures recommended by the Sri Lanka study include reliance on drought-resistant crops and planting of trees like ‘Neem’ that do not need much water.

It is equally important that villagers have enough income to be able to buy their food needs from the market when drought hits their farms.

“What we are arguing in this report is that we may have little control over natural hazards, but yet, we could prepare the people to face these problems,” says ITDG’s Ariyabandu.

However, ITDG officials also say Sri Lankan authorities are not doing enough to prepare the people for a drought.

The drought study is one of the few to be carried out on the subject in the country. The last research on drought was in the year 1986 by W. Tennakoon, a senior economist at the Central Bank. It noted that most government planners had not given enough importance to the issue.

“Had there been an active group of scholars and scientists interested in drought research capable of constantly suggesting to the planners and officials the ways and means of coping with drought, these planners and officials may not have remained so indifferent to drought hazards,” Tennakoon noted in his report.

Researchers say Tennakoon’s comments are still valid today.

“Nothing has been done on those studies and we hope the current research would not go the same way,” says an ITDG official. Sri Lanka’s politicians must be persuaded to ensure quicker implementation of the proposals, he adds.