Ministry of Lands, Irrigation, and Power

by Leelananda De Silva

I was nearing the end of my three years in Kurunegala when I received a telephone call from M. Sri Kantha, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Lands, Irrigation and Power. He said that he would like me to come to his Ministry as Assistant Secretary with immediate effect. I had known Sri Kantha from my Jaffna days and this is how things happen.

From September 1967 to September 1969 I spent two productive years at the Ministry of Lands Irrigation and Power. Sri Kantha told me that I would have a few not very heavy tasks at the core of my assignment and in addition I would be doing odd jobs that arise from time to time. My core tasks were to oversee the Forest Department, Gal oya Development Board, the State Plantations Corporation, keep an eye on the new colonization scheme in the North, Muthuiyyan kaddukulam, and Parliamentary matters relating to the Ministry. As time went on, I did many other things.

The Minister, C.P de Silva was a former civil servant with an intimate knowledge of the subjects of his Ministry. He was an expert in irrigation and land development. He knew the senior officials of his Ministry intimately. For us junior officers he was a remote figure, although I had a lot to do with him.He had entered politics as a member of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, and was one of its leading figures in the 1950s and early 1960s. Now after having crossed over from the SLFP, although he had a powerful and wide ranging Ministry in the UNP Government, he was never again the commanding politician that he once was. His parliamentary secretary (now called deputy minister) was Captain C.P.J. Senewiratne, MP for Mahiyangana. The Minister had nothing to do with him.

The Permanent Secretary told me to keep in touch with him. He was rarely in his office and he had no work in the Ministry. Once he told me that the Minister might be very important in this Ministry, but that he was more important in the party and in Parliament, having been an old UNPer, unlike the Minister.On another occasion he told me to contact the Conservator of Forests and arrange for some forest land in Mahiyangana to be released for development. He said the problem in Mahiyangana was too much forests, and too little land for people to live and I think he had a point. At that time, two thirds of Sri Lanka were forests.

M. Sri Kantha was a fine man. He was reaching the end of his career. A devout Hindu, he spent a considerable time in religious activities. He had been GA Jaffna for a long spell, and he missed Jaffna. He was the ideal foil for a mercurial Minister like C.P de Silva. I used to give Sri Kantha a lift at lunch time in my car to his residence on Norris Canal Road. Sometimes this created a problem for me, as he got held up at meetings.I remember one day that he alerted me, while going in the car, to the perils of sex in middle age. He told me that men in their late 40s and 50s should be very careful in their relations with the opposite sex. All this arose from the news of a current scandal in the Administrative Service where a very senior officer had run away with a very junior female administrator.

The man who managed the Ministry was T. Sivagnanam, Senior Assistant Secretary. He was a reclusive figure and it took a little time for me to establish friendly relations with him. Once that happened he was a warm and kind personality. He knew more about irrigation than most irrigation engineers. I worked with him closely on many issues. The Minister depended heavily on him. Later, under the UNP government after 1977, Sivagnanam distinguished himself in organizing and managing the massive Mahaweli scheme. For the sake of his children and at the end of his career he sought a posting in Washington. He was to die there a few years later. I learnt a lot from Sivagnanam. It is a great pity that this kind of public servant, who served the country without fanfare, is now forgotten.

There were other interesting personalities in the Ministry. P.U. Ratnatunga, who had been Surveyor General, came to the Ministry as Additional Secretary. This was one of the early high level appointments of technical personnel to Ministries. He was a friend and contemporary of the minister at university and a fellow mathematician.At this time the Minister, C.P. was obsessed with the LSSP which he detested (C.P. had left the SLFP in 1964 as he did not fancy working with the LSSP in the new coalition). Ratnatunga reflected to some extent this aversion of the Minister, and I remember this due to an incident which occurred relating to the appointment of an assistant secretary.

I shared a room in the old secretariat with A.G.F (Francis) Perera, an assistant secretary who had come up from the clerical service. He had been the head of the powerful Treasury “G” branch which dealt with the all-island clerical service. His great hero was Shirley Amarasinghe, his old boss at the Treasury, and Francis imitated his manners and his style. He in fact looked a bit like Shirley. We became close friends as time went on.Another person who became a friend was B.H. Hemapriya, the Press Officer. He was close to the Minister and traveled with him all over the island. He was genuinely interested in the work he did and he had great knowledge of Sri Lanka’s history, specially of its irrigation works. He worked hard to get the media interested in the issues that mattered to the Ministry.

Those days the job of a Press Officer was highly professional and Hemapriya aimed at projecting the Ministry and not the Minister. The Minister was pleased with this strategy. Hemapriya was a great friend and an honest and hard working public servant. They did not make money, and his retirement years were not easy.It is through Hemapriya that I met Manik de Silva, who was to be one of my closest friends and one of the great journalists of our time. In 1967 Manik was a young Observer reporter, covering the Ministry of Lands and constantly looking for stories. He used to come and see Hemapriya who introduced him to me.

Manik is a son of Walwin A. de Silva, a distinguished civil servant, and later politician and vice chancellor. Manik made one journalistic scoop through some information I gave him. At this time in 1968 we were living down Model Farm Road in an annexe belonging to V.C. de Silva, former Director of Public Works. We were friendly with him and his family.One day V.C told me that he had just seen the Prime Minister, Dudley Senanayake along with L.B de Silva (former Supreme Court Judge) and H.C. Gunawardane (former Permanent Secretary) and that they have been appointed as the new Salaries Commission. V.C. did not tell me to treat it as confidential news.

Those days the news of the appointment of a Salaries Commission was of enormous significance. The Press had not heard about it. So when Manik came along to see me in the Ministry I told him the news, and he had a scoop, the Observer carrying it with a banner headline. Since that time, We have kept in touch with Manik and his partner Diana Captain (of whom I shall say more later) and they have been our close friends.Manik must count as one of the great Sri Lankan editors of all time, having had a journalistic career of nearly 60 years. We are also friends with Manik’s sister, Nela, who lives in England. Her son, Ganesh Sittampalam, a mathematics prodigy, is in the Guiness Book for being the youngest mathematics graduate in the last century.One of the tasks that I found most interesting in the Ministry was one that was assigned to me by the Minister. The Committee Stage of the Budget Debate in 1968 had an extensive discussion on the Votes of the Ministry of Lands. About 40 MPs intervened, raising a large number of issues, which filled one whole Hansard.

The Minister was anxious to impress on MPs that he was open to their suggestions and criticisms. He asked me to go through the Hansard and follow up each and every issue that has been raised by an MP and to let him know what his response should be to the MP concerned. He wanted me to prepare letters to MPs which he would sign.

This was not as simple a task as I thought it would be. I took about three months to handle all these matters. Apart from consulting with the MP, I had to follow them up with the departments and officials concerned and many of them were located in the districts. Many of the observations made by MPs related to two departments – Land Commissioner’s and the Irrigation Department. The whole exercise was very rewarding as I saw at first hand the interaction between the politician and the public servant.Apart from that, one learnt about the policy implications that arise from individual cases.A fascinating task that came my way was to assist Sivagnanam in the negotiations with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on the Udawalawe project. The ADB was prepared to finance the project and sent two missions, one to do its technical feasibility and then later to negotiate financial assistance.

The technical feasibility mission was carried out by Huntings, a UK based consultancy firm. I looked after that mission from the Ministry. One of the members of that mission was R.W (Dick) Kettlewell, an agriculturalist, with long experience in the British African colonies. In the days prior to independence of Malawi, he had been Minister of Agriculture there. He had also been in Ceylon during the war.

During his visit to Ceylon and after, he became a great friend of ours. We are now friends with his son Michael, a leading Oxford surgeon, and his wife Sarah, whose brother is the Darwinian scholar, Richard Dawkins. Richard and Sarah’s mother, Jean Dawkins was born at Matara in Ceylon during the First World War and she is now nearly 100. They live in Chipping Norton near Oxford in their sprawling four hundred acre farm.

The mission that came from the ADB to negotiate financial assistance was headed by a German called Tacke. Sivagnanam wanted me to do the cost benefit analysis (CBA) of this project with him. That gave me important insights not only to cost benefit analysis but also to the ways in which these large multilateral financial institutions work. We prepared several alternatives of possible CBAs for the project, some more optimistic than others. One could increase the benefits accruing from the project by having an optimistic view of the yields from paddy, and minimizing risks.

There were all kinds of ways in which one could dabble with the levels of costs and benefits. The ADB was anxious to lend the money, and so they were inclined to maximize the potential benefits and lower the risks of failure. The Ministry wanted the money and we were happy to seem more optimistic than we actually were.The ADB had their own views of project management. As financier, they were anxious for an efficient system of management. The Minister had a more political perspective, and was inclined to have his own views on management. The administrators in the Ministry agreed more with the ADB than with the Minister, and used ADB to get their own way with the Minister.

One other assignment of mine was the Committee established by the Prime Minister to inquire into and report on the future of the Gal Oya Development Board (GODB). The GODB had outlived its usefulness, but it was difficult to get rid of it as, after 20 years of life, there were vested interests. The Prime Minister appointed John Arthur Amaratunga, Deputy Minister of Planning to be the sole member of the Committee.The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry appointed me as the Secretary of the Committee. In appointing this Committee, the Prime Minister did not consult the Minster. The Minister’s relations with the Prime Minister were semi-detached, and there were tensions in the relationship. The Planning Ministry was critical of the Lands Ministry in several respects and the Prime Minister was the Planning Minister.

Sri Kantha, in appointing me as Secretary told me that I do not have to keep them informed of what is going on, as neither he nor the Minister were interested in the subject. The Committee held a few meetings and I wrote the report with the guidance of Arthur Amaratunga. The overall recommendation was to wind up the Gal Oya Board. It was a delight to work with Amaratunga. We did most of our work at his home on Gregory’s Road, over cups of tea for me and a little stronger brew for him. We were to later become family friends with the Amaratungas.

My work on this Committee brought me into contact with the Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake on two or three occasions. On one of these occasions, I remember seeing Gamani Corea who was Permanent Secretary, Planning. He made a presentation to the Prime Minister about cultivation of paddy, quoting FAO reports. At the end of it, the Prime Minister asked Gamani whether he had ever stepped into a paddy field. The Prime Minister obviously knew more about paddy cultivation than the FAO experts.

When I reflect on my days with the Ministry of Lands over a period of 10 years, it strikes me that technical, in contrast to administrative, personnel, were the most important people in the Ministry, at all levels. The irrigation and electrical engineers, and the surveys people and technical assistants, were the ones who were at the frontline of development activities of the Ministry. They were the people who opened up the dry zone and built the dams and the canals to irrigate the land.

They have not received their due share of recognition for the contribution they made. In my work during these 10 years I had a close working relationship with these technical personnel at all levels in remote comers of Sri Lanka. Going on circuit in the districts, I have stayed with these people in their homes in remote areas, many of them located close to irrigation tanks, and there was a great sense of comradeship. It is difficult to mention all their names, but the memory of a romantic dry zone remains with me. I loved working in the dry zone at a time when these places were still remote.

During my years at the Lands Ministry, I was involved with the Ceylon Administrative Service Association (CASA). In 1968. they appointed me as one if its joint secretaries, along with Ranjith Withana. I held this post only for one year as I was leaving for the UK. The President of CASA was D. Rajendra, who was then the Commissioner of National Housing. Rajendra was an engaging personality and was the son of Sir Waityalingam Doraiswamy who had been the MP for Kayts and Speaker of the State Council.

To go back, it was an exciting time for the CASA. The Civil Service was abolished in 1962 and in its place had come the Ceylon Administrative Service. One of the main issues was how to select the limited number of persons for the higher grades from about 400 staff officers in the public service. The solution at the time was to have a competitive examination for all staff officers with over five years service, so that a limited number can be recruited to move on to higher grades.

In 1967, the first examination was held and 37 officers were selected. There was much resentment at this arrangement on the part of a large number of officers who did not get through the examination.They wanted this arrangement to be done away with and instead move towards a seniority-based promotion system and the expansion of the number in the higher classes. The younger officers preferred the current arrangement.

That year in 1969, the annual general meeting of the CASA was not pleasant. Several officers whom I knew well and one or two whom I considered were friends made noisy and angry protests. That incident remains in my mind. After I left, the CASA broke up into two. Anyway, being Secretary of the Association gave me a new interest in public administration issues. I might add here that the Prime Minister Dudley Senanayaka was the chief guest for the CASA dinner after all the shenanigans of the day in 1969.

(Excerpted from the writer’s autobiography, The Long Littleness of Life. Leelananda De Silva was a member of the Ceylon Administrative Service from 1960 to 1978. He was Senior Assistant Secretary and Director of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs in the 1970s working closely with Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike. Later in his career he was a senior international consultant in the UN system and Resident Representative of the Third World Forum in Geneva)