Fail to plan and plan to fail
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Katunayake Expressway.
A few weeks ago, I attended a Transport and Logistics Conference at University of Moratuwa as one of the panellists to contribute to a discussion on “National Physical Planning Policy and Transportation System in Sri Lanka”. The other distinguished panellists were Amal Kumarage, Professor at the Department of Transport Management and Logistics Engineering, and Jagath Munasinghe, Professor and Head of the Department of Town and Country Planning, while the discussion was moderated by Dr. Chathura De Silva of the same department.
The issue that I am focusing in this column today is based on the information and research-based evidence revealed at this panel discussion. I am trying to emphasise that while Sri Lanka’s development process has moved without a proper physical planning, most of the tragic issues and development discontents that we are faced with today is also a result of this problem.
Transport for the poor
The discussion was timely and, considering our non-existent transport development based on a physical plan, I would say that it has never been untimely. I am not sure if we ever had any policy-driven approach to transport planning and development. As a result, throughout the past 45 years, our public transport system has hardly changed; it is still the same ‘indiscipline and inconvenient’ system that we started off in 1977.
Over the years, the public transport system of Sri Lanka has virtually converted to be the ‘transport mode of the poor’. With upward social mobility, when people get elevated to a ‘middle class’ category, they switch from public transport mode to a private transport mode. One of the reasons may be the need of the public to reject the use of public transport system in its underdeveloped status.
As a result, road congestion escalated, traffic flows multiplied, pollution intensified and the time that people spend on roads increased. Thus, the transport system became a bottleneck constraining economic development rather than facilitating it.
One of the recent attempts for developing the public transport system in the most-congested region in the country, the Western Province, was a plan by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) through a grant of the US Government. The approved grant was US$ 480 million – the largest grant funding ever received by Sri Lanka, while the major component of the grant was directed at modernising the public transport system.
However, the politicians contesting the forthcoming elections in 2019 and the opinion-makers of the people turned it down. While they all played politics, leaders too sailed as the wind blew. The people are still left with the same outdated public transport system and even without any hope for a better system.
Physical planning
Until the recent times, national physical planning has been an under-represented subject area in the Sri Lankan development discourse. The term ‘national physical planning’ means the planned utilisation of the country’s physical resources – land, water, ocean, and all forms of natural resources therein – in order to achieve development with ecological, economic and social objectives.
A national physical plan is used to map the land area of the entire country to derive a better development outcome balancing ecological, economic and social objectives. Accordingly, a national physical plan is expected to demarcate land for every possible usage – residential areas, agricultural areas, sustainable villages, urban locations, transport infrastructure, and above all the conservation plans for “sensitive areas” such as forests and wildlife, biological diversity and ecosystem services, water streams and water reservoirs, and marine resources. Then a physical plan, starting from a country-level designed land use patterns goes down to sub-national levels, and even to smaller urban or village levels with detailed physical mapping.
Although the subject matter seems to have been taken in policy forums since the 1940s and attempts have been made for land utilisation in different localities, its need in a ‘national context’ seems to have got undermined throughout. The Town and Country Planning Ordinance No. 13 of 1946 recognised the need for formulating a national land use policy covering the whole country. But its actual work has begun more than 50 years later under the amendment of the Act in 2000 only.
The most important planning exercise that the National Physical Planning Department has completed was the National Physical Plan in 2007, which was improved in 2019 with extensive research-based inputs. The 2007 Plan projects a basic physical map of the island of Sri Lanka with metro regions where people would be concentrating, forest and wildlife reserves, environmental sensitive areas, proposed transport network, rural areas and agriculture and other.
The Physical Plan of 2019 is a detailed design for entire Sri Lanka identifying the salient features future development of the country with efficient and effective use of physical resources. Some of these features are the country’s unique and critical conservation areas, locations for most appropriate human habitation, optimum usage of natural resources and infrastructure, and the most potential economic corridors of the country.
Rural life, not romantic
Over the past 75 years, the population of Sri Lanka has trebled, which now stands to be over 22 million. Much of the increasing population has spread throughout the country clearing the forests, demolishing wildlife, and even encroaching on reservation lands rather than concentrating in the appropriate metro regions and urban settlements.
In fact, urbanisation and population concentration have been an essential outcome of the development process, in the countries which are growing fast. This is the reason why in developed countries about 80 – 90 per cent of people live in the urban settlements working in industry and services sectors, leaving a larger part of the countries’ forests and large farmlands. In fact, only a 2 – 4 per cent of the labour force is in the agriculture sector too, but their output is much larger making the farmers being high-income earners.
Sri Lanka is not a land-abandoned country in the world. Its rural population is exceptionally large, while still about a quarter of the workforce is also interlocked in the rural agriculture sector. It has compelled them to remain poor for generations, while for this reason over 90 per cent of the country’s poor people live in the rural sector. It has also made agriculture a less-productive and under-developed economic activity, as too many people continue to produce too little on too small farm plots.
Not all the villages in Sri Lanka can thrive, and even to survive in the future. Change in weather conditions which also has much to do with human actions without physical planning, often determine the fate of our rural people in most parts of the country. Most of the disastrous events and circumstances that the people face today are either a direct or an indirect result of human activities that have taken place in the past without physical planning. Human-elephant conflict, excessive droughts, excessive floods, and landslides and erosions are some of these calamities.
The lack of physical planning has allowed the country’s development and human activities to go forward haphazardly. It has also given discretionary powers with an upper hand to politicians to handle land at their will; in the absence of an enacted physical plan nationally as well as sub-nationally, they exercise their political authority with discretionary powers over the land. It is a wrong usage of political powers, which appear to have been legitimised in the absence of laws and regulations enforcing physical planning.
Nation’s online safety
By the way, I am not sure how much we value or how much we make use of the Physical Plan of 2019 that was formulated with four years of effort for the period 2020-2050. We all can remember that how it was also politically sidelined in 2019 together with the MCC grant rejected. The Colombo-Trincomalee economic corridor which was the most potential economic corridor of the country according to the Plan was interpreted by opinion-makers using mostly the social media platforms, as a conspiracy to divide the country.
(The writer is a former Professor of Economics at the University of Colombo and can be reached at sirimal@econ.cmb.ac.lk and follow on Twitter @SirimalAshoka).
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