The plight of the daily paid quarry workers
The minute the Easter Bombing happened
the Government immediately banned the sale of any ammunition or gun powder or
dynamite constantly used in Sri Lanka to blow granite for the rock quarrying industry.
This meant that industry came to a standstill and granite rock became scarce in
the market place for use in home building.
The real side effect say in the poorer
area of Kurunegala, say in the Katupotha area where there are 300 such small
quarries employing people who are on the breadline, who can do no other work,
were left without their daily wage. They are day laborers who sometimes come
with their families who live in tents in appalling conditions to earn some
money crushing rocks with their hands once the dynamite blows chunks of rock
from the rock face.
Being who they are, no shop gives them
credit for food items either. So once they lose their livelihood they literally
starve without anything to eat. There is no one they can go for relief. As
transient residents, they don’t even get Samurdhi (welfare) as they are of NO
permanent residence.
Can any politician understand that by their
actions there are people who are so poor who have been directly affected by
them and have no one to ask for help, and being low down the pecking order are
the forgotten people of the land?
They need to be identified, but the government
system fails this type of person, as they don’t get recorded anywhere. No one
bats for them, or cares about them.
I presume often they don’t have a vote,
so that is an even more serious case of willful neglect of the poorest of our
society by the society itself, not having a mechanism to pick up those who don’t.
Finally, on Wednesday, 29th May
2019, there was a decision to grant permits once again to purchase gun powder
or dynamite, after getting a permit from the District Secretariat where the particular
quarry is. I presument the Bureau of Mines and Geological Survey that grants
this permit is also involved in the approval procedure and after over a month,
these people finally have some relief.
I was given all this information by my
driver Sugath who was appalled at the level to which these people had fallen
into after the Easter Day Terrorist acts as innocent section of the community being
most affected by the catastrophe.
This was written as a note to myself,
for future reference, and action.
