The Port City matter

Our goose seems to be cooked. Marinated in Soya Sauce. The noise about this adventure has been deflected from the main issue. Is the Port City really necessary and the best of available options?

Keeping the dreams, hopes and “Bull” aside for a moment, why was this adventure even considered? This is a huge investment, that may well join the queue behind the “Mahinda Rajapaksa Harbour and Airport”, the “Bird Cage” Hall and most of all, the “Nelum Kulunna – emblems of shabby miscalculations and empty hopes? Do we really need another Port? Now that the Colombo Harbour, its premises and a great part of the coastal shoreline have been fouled up by the sinking “X Press Pearl” container ship, is it suggested that it shows up the virtues of having this second harbour? Assuming of course, that ships scheduled to lay anchor in Colombo, might not just give Sri Lanka a miss and proceed elsewhere!

Being busy with the task of encroaching into the Indian Ocean, what have we done about the treasure trove (said to be some eighteen times our land area) gifted to us on a Golden Platter by the “Law of the Sea” Convention of the United Nations? Do we even know the quantity and value (however crude) of the Deposits beneath the waters? With the semi-conductor needs expected to balloon by the greater demands of electronics, and the current resources diminishing (Australia being the main source), this is a good time for proactive prospecting. Will the neighbouring countries here to help us to measure the extent of damage due to the burnt and sunken ship, also get a preview of the treasure lying in the Ocean bed and deemed to be ours?

What is the justification for the 250 hectares reclaimed – when it is not that we are short of land? Just consider the vast extents of land, within an area lying roughly in the triangle circumscribed by Kalutara, Gampaha and Chilaw, much of it being abandoned paddy lands. Of course, it would be argued that the land required for luxury housing, recreation facilities, gambling centres, etc., that will burgeon in the Port City, cannot possibly be located inland. I also hold the fears of an amateur that massive, multi-storied high-rises, could be risky and unstable on foundations moored in (essentially), rock, rubble and sand. I am sure that such seemingly trivial matters would have been considered within a whole Ministry of “Western area and Metropolis Development “- or some such moniker. We are certain that many a heart in Hong Kong and Dubai would be aflutter with fears that they will soon be knocked off their high perches by the CPCP.

Twenty years ago the tsunami struck and took away something like 40,000 of Sri Lankan lives. If anyone prior to this tragedy foretold anything like it, he would have been considered a certifiable lunatic. Likewise, five years ago, if someone imagined that some of the crashing waves could be as high as 20-25 metres, would it have been believed? What if five years ago, some pessimist predicted that an invasion by a submicroscopic virus, (barely capable of even denting the ego of mighty man,) struck to decimate us in just a few years (almost nothing in geological time), and spread to the remotest corners of the planet? That would have been daft.

We have been consistent in our inconsistency. Remember the noise made before some election, about how we would “kick the Chinese out”, not only from Hambantota, and how we soon went back on bended knees, imploring them to come back and offering them a toffee of some fifteen thousand hectares of land (some of it doubtless inhabited). What a promising start!

Talking of Ports, our projections of improvement of shipping activity in the MR Ruhuna Port, might need to be revised. Remember the song sung to us then, was that the thousands of ships passing within hand-waving distance of our shoreline, would be enticed to lay anchor in our harbour. Is it permissible to ask whether even the cost of the grand “Opening Ceremony” has been recovered? There may be less in-bound cargo, with the “one fell stroke” of banning the import of Agrochemicals, Palm Oil and the possible postponement of the landing of the 226 Super Luxury SUVs, while out-bound cargo will be diminished by cuts in exports of tea, rubber, coconut and housemaids

Dr. Upatissa Pethiyagoda