Sri Lanka is a land of 20,000 villages which are very poorly organized to benefit those living there. These villages need a complete overhaul such as what is suggested.
I have recently spent a lot of time
travelling around the country on unnamed roads and following dirt tracks to
discover where people live and what they do and formulate recommendations for
the long term on how we need to do some immediate social engineering to maximize
the quality of life of the people living in Sri Lanka.
I see many people in villages living a
hand to mouth existence, borrowing from money lenders to survive, and it is the
money lenders who end up buying up property and effectively own the foolish villagers
who get into debt.
So what is the practical way out for the
survival of the village? A village can only survive if it is efficiently managed,
not just having people who don’t fit in and who don’t contribute to the life of
the village.
In order to better manage a village, we
can have people living in a house and a small plot of land around them, but who
earn their income from a profession or trade, NOT farming. We need to have
village lands cultivated by a few good farmers who know about agriculture and
are willing to try new techniques that with climate change will inevitably be
necessary. For that we need more educated professional farmers. They are better
able to invest in HEC prevention.
All those who are not, will be
encouraged to sell their lands to those who can and instead be given incentives
to re train and find employment in other areas. A farm tractor driver is NOT a
farmer. All he does is drive his or an owner’s tractor for a daily return,
wages or part of the daily taking which is more common in villagers. Ploughing
an acre, the driver gets Rs1K and owner Rs9K.
By this means unproductive people will
move out of the village into semi urban settings in larger towns, where they
can get employment and for whom some housing is provided at subsidized rates by
the state. In this way there will be a much better allocation of resources, and
wean people from Samurdhi welfare if they are able bodied and employable. Lower
infrastructure needs too will result.
It is important to appreciate that there
are many people currently living in the village ONLY because they were given
state land. However being given land does not a farmer make, and that is why they
are in this rut. I am suggesting moving a million people from this rut, into a
chance of better employment opportunities in an urban setting where there is a
lot more economic activity.
We can then have an equilibrium in a
village where man and beast can live in harmony devoid of some of the human
elephant conflict (HEC) we see today.
6 comments:
The villages are being burnt!
Drive around the countryside, and you will see how much of it has been deliberately burned by people who think it is the best way to open up more land. First you have to use water wisely and maximize the productivity of what is there, not add more land to go to waste
While my point sounds funny if it was not so tragic, where only 10% of the people in the village earn from working in the village, all others work from going out of the village. So what is this village for?
Move people at the bottom of the pile out of the village immediately and provide them with urban housing where in every town of over 10,000 people there are job vacancies and no takers. Just go to any shop keeper and he will tell you he is desperate for workers, and it costs too much and takes too much time for people to come to work from where they live, so provide the damn housing in the town, not in elephant country creating more problems.
The idiots who are politicians are the cause of this country's downfall. Who is the brainless moron who is building housing in villages where people are moving out of villages but cannot sell their homes as they don't have proper title. So why build more houses for the homeless, buy those houses and give them, so the man with the job can move out of the village. He does not want him and and his children commuting to the town and back everyday.
Sri Lanka is urbanising, just look at the population shift to the Gampaha District over the past 10 years from villages.
Allow those people who move to sell their homes, by giving them title, instead of having to hang on to them empty, with current, water all provided by the state at great expense when they are living in shacks in Gampaha unable to sell their homes.
What is worse, their vote is in the village where they don't live anymore, so no one takes care of them anyway. Aiyo Politics the reason for this mess.
All this pressure on transport will stop, once people are closer to their work, not far away as it is today
Who is this donkey building houses where none are required? Aren't they called Gam Udawa, when it is really Gama Maranaya he is presiding over by doing this treachery
First poll each family using the GN and ask the question, if you were given Rs500K will you leave this village? Find out how many who will say yes. Begin with them, as that is incentive enough to gauge the problem, and they can put that Rs500K as a deposit on the home given to them in areas of high vacancies, and no takers.
you can take the villager out of the village but can't take the village out of the villager. Just keep them there and create farming collectives there to enhance farming techniques and knowledge of the villagers there. don't run them into urban slums where their industrial master will be skimming all of their productivity for his own greedy benefit! The ruse about the abundant factory jobs is smoke and mirrors. if there are abundant jobs wages should be increasing and those jobs will eventually be filled when they provide a living wage
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