SRI LANKA: Laws to Plug Power Crisis Worry Activists

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Apr 23 2002 (IPS) - Environmentalists and scientists in Sri Lanka are up in arms against new laws that allow the set-up of emergency power plants, saying they would stifle legitimate protests and override environmental concerns although they are aimed at addressing serious power cuts in the country.

“‘Even the media has been silent on these laws and little discussion has taken place in the press,” said Dr Janaka Ratnasiri, scientist and president of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (SLAAS).

Last month, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe’s United National Party (UNP) coalition government, which came to power in December, pushed through legislation in parliament creating an Energy Supplies Act (ESA) to generate emergency power and meet rising demand.

The government said it was suspending certain laws for a two-year period under the act to enable emergency power plants to be installed without any hindrance.

Ratnasiri and environmentalists described the legislation as draconian, because it bars any legal action against power plants and allows the minister in charge to nullify any decisions by an energy committee in the implementation of new plants.

The government’s desperate effort to stimulate the energy sector and induce the private sector to install new power plants stems from an electricity crisis that has been on since July 2001.

Sri Lanka, suffering its worst-ever drought for the past year, has imposed power cuts of six hours daily since July in the hope that long-delayed monsoon rains would come. But except for a few showers there is insufficient rain in the central regions, where most of the country’s hydropower reservoirs are located.

The country is also heavily reliant on monsoon rains for its agriculture and domestic water consumption. Agriculture has also been badly affected by water shortages.

But so far, Ratnasiri says, environmentalists have been not heard out by the government. The SLAAS protested to the government on the new laws, but just received an acknowledgement of their letter and no other action.

The ESA was approved in parliament just as the new government’s first national budget was presented in parliament.

Some say it appeared that the government slipped through the controversial emergency power laws while attention was focused on the budget and on peace talks between the government and Tamil rebels, due to start in Thailand in June.

Hemantha Withanage, a well-known environmental specialist, said that under these emergency laws, an environmental impact assessment (EIA) is not necessary in the approval of new power plants as normally required.

“The state-run Central Environmental Authority (CEA) submits a report to an energy committee which decides on the environmental impact. There is no environmental representative on this committee and the power and energy minister has the power to ignore any decision made by this committee,” he said.

Withanage, also executive director of the Environmental Foundation Ltd (EFL), the country’s biggest environmental watchdog, said the decisions of the committee or the minister cannot be challenged in a court of law.

This is unlike the earlier set-up, when court action has been successfully brought against CEA decisions or government projects.

“‘The danger in this legislation is that such decisions cannot be challenged in court. There is no protection for the environment when power plants are approved,” he said.

The UNP, which was in opposition when the power crisis first gripped the country, vowed to find quick solutions if it won the December parliamentary polls.

But despite its poll victory, the new government has been struggling to contain the problem, even resorting to extra power cuts and blaming the previous administration for mismanaging the crisis.

Power and Energy Minister Karu Jayasuriya, who has promised to quit in six months since his appointment – or by June 2002 — if the power cuts are not entirely lifted and the crisis ended, says the government inherited a badly mismanaged energy sector.

“We never anticipated before taking over that the power sector had been mismanaged so badly as we now see,” he said in newspaper interviews earlier this year, adding that soaring debts in the CEB has compounded the problems.

While Sri Lanka is dependent on hydropower, the former administration had delayed implementing thermal power projects that if on stream, would have eased the present crisis.

The biggest project, a coal power plant expected to generate some 20 percent of the country’s power needs in the next 10 years, has been stalled by protests from the Catholic Church, residents and environmentalists.

The plant was to come up in the town of Norochcholai on the north-west coast but has been at a standstill since the mid-1990s, owning to concerns that it would uproot families and pollute the environment.

The CEB authorities pinned their hopes on the Norochcholai plant, which was to be funded by the Japanese government. This had delayed the implementation of other thermal power plants, thus triggering the current energy crisis.

Withanage’s EFL has been key in campaigning against some power plants through court injunctions on the grounds that they emitted toxic fumes and caused noise pollution.

He said the new laws have suspended the National Environmental Act and sections of other laws like the Penal Code, Public Nuisance Ordinance and Criminal Procedure Code. This, he said, is because “public nuisance cases pertaining to energy plants can also be filed under these acts which relate to general crime”.

EFL has opposed and won landmark cases against at least two power plants like the one at Ethul Kotte, in which it obtained a court injunction because the plants’ operation exceeded accepted noise levels.

In 1996, the former government of Chandrika Kumaratunga, now the president, brought similar legislation for emergency plants. But critics say the present laws are worst than the previous ones, since there is no provision to contest these issues in court.

In 1998, EFL protested plans for a giant hydropower project at Upper Kotmale in the central region, which encompasses seven waterfalls. EFL complained that the project would alter the waterfalls.

Two weeks ago, the government signed an agreement with Japan to fund this project that has also raised the concerns of civil engineers, says SLAAS’s Ratnasiri. Under the new energy laws, no opposition will be brooked in court over the Upper Kotmale project, he said.

EFL’s Withanage argues that the problem is that the current government does not have a plan to overcome the energy crisis: They are only managing it. It is a crisis management exercise and not energy management.”

SRI LANKA: Laws to Plug Power Crisis Worry Activists

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Apr 23 2002 (IPS) - Environmentalists and scientists in Sri Lanka are up in arms against new laws that allow the set-up of emergency power plants, saying they would stifle legitimate protests and override environmental concerns although they are aimed at addressing serious power cuts in the country.
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