Looking Back at DS Senanayake and the Gal Oya Project

Ajit Kanagasundram, courtesy Sunday Island 18^th & 25^th September 2016, where the title is “The Gal Oya Project 60 years on” … an essay supported by personal experiences and his father’s key role in this pathfinding development project. ALSO  go to http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2016/10/10/the-gal-oya-project-60-years-on/ for the same essay and significant blog comments therein. … Emphasis by highlights is my imprint Editor, Thuppahi

Not many people today remember the Gal Oya Project but for 20 years it was the showpiece of modern independent Ceylon. It was later overshadowed by more grand (grandiose?) projects like Mahaveli where billions more were spent but the Gal Oya Project remains the standard by which all other projects should be judged. The Gal Oya Project, moreover, stands as an exemplar as to how things should be done under ideal circumstances. The project was done and paid for within our own resources, managed by local administrators and completed on time and all major objectives relating to the clearing of forest, settlement of colonists and irrigation of land were accomplished.

K. Kanagasundram

Even more remarkable, all through the project there was no whiff of scandal, though many millions were spent on equipment. My father when he was Chairman of the Gal Oya Board and building his house in Colombo, would not order building supplies under his own name as he feared unsolicited discounts from suppliers. Very different from later projects like the Mahaveli where it was a standing joke that the Mahaveli had been diverted from Trinco to Finco.

Let me first confess my bias – I have been intimately involved in the project since childhood. My father was the Chairman of the Gal Oya Board from 1952 to 1957, when the bulk of the work was done – like the building of the main dam, clearing the jungle, constructing the irrigation system and settling 70% of the colonists. Among my happiest memories are holidays spent at Ampara and Inginiyagala when the area teemed with wildlife – my lifelong passion. After graduating from Cambridge my first job (given by R.L Kahawita, then Chairman of Gal Oya Board, was as a field worker paid Rs 10 per day (!) in a socio-economic survey of the colonists’ standard of living.

I was later the Assistant Secretary to the Gal Oya Project Evaluation Committee headed by one of my Cambridge professors B.H. Farmer, and where the Secretary was Tissa Devendra my first (and best) boss (!), and one of the last of the truly distinguished public servants. Yes – I am biased but the facts speak for themselves and I hope that they will teach us that, like in the days of the great Sinhala kings, we Lankans can still do great public works for the general good and do it to world class standards.

The Genesis of the Project

The genesis of this projects, and indeed all other projects that followed it like the Mahaweli, was our first Prime Minister D S Senanayake’s vision to settle the dry zone with Sinhala colonists from the Kandyan areas, provide them with cleared land, irrigation and housing and redress in some way the historical injustice done to them when the British expropriated their ancestral lands – especially after the Kandyan revolt of 1848 (under the infamous Waste Lands Ordinance ) and then cleared the land and cultivated coffee and tea with alien Indian Tamil labourers. This was the first “ethnic cleansing” in Sri Lanka.

Was there an anti-Tamil racist element in DS’s thinking? Historians who have studied him will not agree and my father, who knew him well, confirmed it to me. DS was pro-Sinhala not anti-Tamil. It was the Sinhala people who had their traditional homelands expropriated by the British and who suffered from endemic land hunger especially in the Kandy and Kegalle areas. Furthermore, the lands to be colonized were in jungle areas (albeit within the “historical homelands’’ of the Tamils (according to the Federal Party) and during the project not a single Tamil farmer was displaced. On the contrary there was generous provision for village expansion in the Purana lands cultivated by Muslims and Tamils. The Sinhalese settled were for the most part, true farmers – goviyas – and were able to make full use of the government largesse. If DS had any prejudice it was to favour the goigamas and vellalas!

Once, travelling to Batticaloa by train my father was told by SJV Chelvanayagam, the founding father of the Federal Party, ” Young man – do you realize that you are driving a dagger into the heart of the Tamil people?” My father patiently explained that as AGA Kegalle he had witnessed the dire land hunger of the Kandyan peasantry. The lands colonized were jungle lands uninhabited, and there would be ample village expansion lands for the Tamils and Muslims in the Purana lands.  

All to no avail. Chelvanayagam exhibited the same dog-in-the manger attitude that the Federal Party was to show till the 1970s when JR Jayewardene settled the issue once and for all, this time with an overtly racist motivation and used the Mahaveli project to settle tens of thousands of Sinhalese in the North-east and forever changed the demographic balance in the East and destroyed forever the Eelamist dream of a Tamil Ealam in the North and the East. This time the colonization was not accompanied by village expansion schemes for the Tamils in their traditional lands and many were evicted from their ancestral lands. From Sri Lanka’s point of view a desirable end was achieved but at the cost of unnecessary suffering for the Tamils displaced.

But now, back to the history of Gal Oya – in the late 1940s, DS consulted a small group of engineers in the Irrigation Department about the possibility of a major colonization/irrigation project in place of the incremental colonization that had been done in the 30s and 40s when DS was the Agriculture Minister in the colonial era State Council. The engineers, headed by R L Kahawita and Kennedy, recommended Gal Oya (Kahawita and Arumugam were the two greatest hydraulic engineers we have produced.) Incidentally Kahawita’s son, Professor Renee Kahawita, is a Professor of Hydraulics at the University of Montreal and the principal consultant to the Chinese government in the Three Gorges Project – the greatest engineering project in history. They recommended the following:

1) They could design the dam and irrigation network but Ceylon lacked the engineering depth to implement the main dam project.

2) Modern equipment be used to supplant the traditional labour intensive schemes to accelerate implementation of building the irrigation system and clearing the land for the colonists

3) 50,000 colonist families could be settled in cleared land with housing and irrigation within five years– a monumental task.

DS set to work immediately – an international tender was called and within three months given to Morrison Knudsen, a US firm that had earned its spurs constructing airfields for the US military under Japanese fire. They were known not to waste time. Kahawita was sent to Boulder, Colorado to design the dam with a world famous engineer, whose name I have forgotten. Then DS looked around for the best administrator he could find and picked Huxham, an Australian Civil Servant who was the Head of the Treasury to head the project, at the then princely salary of Rs 3,000 per month – unheard of in the Civil Service!

A Bill was passed in Parliament setting up the Gal Oya Development Board – hereinafter GODB. It was to have plenipotentiary powers over 1,400 square miles – combining the powers of the Government Agent, Irrigation Department, Electricity and Water Boards and all local authority functions.

But things moved too fast for Huxham who was used to the more sedate ways of the British Civil Service. Kahawita finished the design and Morrison Knudsen arrived in Ceylon like an invasion force.

Meanwhile equipment for the irrigation work, which was to be done by the GODB, started arriving at Colombo harbor and piled up – no store room, no inventory.The Board members also were not on speaking terms – in other words – chaos! Huxham could not deal with it and suffered a heart attack.

DS then looked around and chose my father, then 39-years old and enjoying his first posting in Colombo as Land Commissioner. In my father’s words – “The PM called me to his room and Dudley was also there looking pensive and smoking a pipe. ‘Kanagasundram,’ said DS “I want you to take up the post of Chairman Gal Oya Board with immediate effect.” That was all” – The first thought that hit my father was that he would have to resign from his beloved Civil Service and, then, what about his pension (beloved by the Jaffna man).? But that was the end of the conversation and my father was dismissed. Later, when he visited Huxham in hospital he was told – “Young man – this is an impossible job and will be the end of your career;’’ in ways that he could not have foreseen Huxham was right!

The Gal Oya Board consisted of the following people – my father K Kanagasundram was the Chairman, N E Weerasooria (a leading UNP lawyer), Arthur Amaratunga a shrewd UNP operative and R L Brohier, a distinguished former Surveyor General. Civil Servant Shirley Amerasinghe was the Resident Manager in Ampara. The first thing my father did was to restore harmony among the Board members, who were at that time not on talking terms and prone to fling files at each other during Board meetings, and get down to the arduous task of bringing order to the existing chaos. He later told me he could not see the end result but tackled each challenge one – by – one. Eventually, some type of order was restored and the goal of having 150,000 acres ready for colonization in two years was in sight.

The contract with Morrison Knudsen stipulated a bonus payment if they completed the dam at Inginiyagala early. With the military precision with which they had come to Ceylon they decided to bypass Colombo and Trinco ports as transport to the site would be a problem but instead used Batticaloa harbor and widened the road to Inginiyagala – they also built luxurious housing for their staff. Many of the buildings like the present Rest House at Inginiyagala still remain. They furnished these quarters to American standards with air conditioners, fridges and freezers – unheard of luxuries then. I still remember being fascinated by a juke box containing records with the latest Broadway hits.

Using the latest heavy equipment and working round the clock shifts and methods perfected in the heat of war Morrison Knudsen were on track to finish the dam – the largest in Ceylon – early and earn a substantial bonus. Ceylon had never witnessed anything like this.

But Ceylon had a team to meet the challenge – the Minister of Agriculture was Bulankulama Disawa, an old style Kandyan aristocrat who delegated full power to his team in five years he only intervened in Board affairs once – to get a family retainer land under the scheme). The GODB was led by Kanagasundram, the outstanding civil servant of his generation. The Board had varied experience and the Resident Manager was Shirley Amerasinghe, who later distinguished himself on the world stage as the author of the Law of the Sea when he was our Ambassador to the UN. What a team – the original “dream team”! The GODB had to scramble to build the right and left bank irrigation channels, clear the land and build 30,000 colonist cottages to be ready in time.

There were interesting stories from this time – during land clearing a wild elephant once charged a group of workers seriously injuring six, but a bulldozer driver charged the elephant in his machine and killed the poor animal who was only defending his turf. The rush to be ready caused the only wrong decision by the Chairman – in hindsight it would have been better to use the traditional slash and burn methods rather than the mechanized option chosen, as this would have preserved the top soil better. But given the rush to be ready for the colonist there was no choice.

By 1953 the dam, power station and irrigation system with cleared lands and colonist cottages were ready. A record breaking feat by any measure! And colonists were brought by train to Batticaloa and thence by truck to their new homes – in their tens of thousands. It was an encouraging sight to see so many eagerly looking forward to their new lives, and carrying their meagre worldly possessions with them. The early colonists were pampered lot and got two acres of high land and five acres of paddy land – together with cooking utensils and farm implements. This was later reduced to two acres of highland and three acres of paddy land. There was a Colonization Officer to look after the wants of every 100 families and their progress was measured. Never before or since was so much care taken to ensure the welfare of colonists. By 1957, 70% the colonization process was completed.

There were many other achievements: a 10 MW hydro power plant, a tile factory, a huge rice mill (sourced by Raju Coomaraswamy – another of the Civil Service ‘mafia’, later a high official in the UNDP) and a sugar factory. The latter was one of the few failures of GODB. Land suitable for sugar cane was identified and a sugar factory was built. But to keep it profitably running you needed the output of 25,000 acres of sugar land. Even in tea plantations where we had 100 years of experience there were never more than 1,500 acres under one management. The GODB had an out- of-the-box solution – to bring in Japanese farmers (the Japan International Co-operation agency – JICA – had a scheme to settle Japanese farmers in Brazil and they were to do the same for Sri Lanka) – imagine what 500 Japanese farmers – the best the world – could have done for farming and horticulture in Ceylon! But before the scheme was implemented the government changed and the SLFP vetoed the scheme. The result was predictable – the local farmers, unused to sugar cane cultivation, were never able to supply more than 18% of the factory’s requirements – another wasted opportunity!

‘Camelot’ in the East

Then the Gal Oya valley entered an idyllic period – the main objectives were being met on time, the farmers were bringing in their first crops, there was a thriving Club for officers of the GODB at Ampara with tennis, tombola for the ladies, bridge, snooker and carrom. It was a thriving community of Sinhalese , Tamils and especially Burghers attracted by the pioneering challenge. There were even a few European refugees from World War II, settled under a UN scheme for the stateless – all highly qualified. There was Burkhart, a barrel-chested native of Danzig – who earned the respect of his tough Sinhala workers by being able to repair any type of machine with his bare hands. Chekovitz, a Jewish refugee from Czecoslovakia, who was the GODB architect – he introduced the concept of airy building using natural ventilation even before Geoffrey Bawa. He was responsible for the office and staff quarters that were later criticized by the Gal Oya Evaluation Committee as too extravagant. But best of all there was Stan Francis – a gentle giant of a man from the South African railways. Not only was a he a superb mechanical engineer but he was an excellent organizer and motivator who cajoled his Sinhala workers to Herculean heights.

Morrison Knudsen had left behind all their heavy equipment used in the dam construction. Stan Francis set up a base workshop and repaired and refurbished these machines and had them ready for round the clock work on land clearing and building the irrigation system which was the responsibility of the GODB . My father later said that he not only had he saved the country millions in foreign exchange but also cut down the time required by six months !

DS’s dream had been fulfilled – Camelot had been created in the jungles of the Eastern province- but then a dark cloud descended.

End of the Dream

In 1956 the government changed and the SLFP took over with necessary but different priorities to peasant colonization. The communal bogy raised its ugly head and the Gal Oya workers, instigated by Minister Philip Gunawardane after the Galle Face satyagraha by the Federal Party politicians, rioted against the Tamil staff in GODB. The 1956 riots were the first of many later pogroms against the Tamils. Later it was revealed that about 100 Tamils were killed.

 LH Mettananda addressing a Snhala crowd at Galle Face  Green, Colombo, during mass protests in support of Sinhala Only

Eighty-five Tamil staff and families with infants, including two pregnant women, sought refuge at the Ampara Rest House which was surrounded by a mob of 500 Sinhala workers. My father and mother were there as well and did their best to keep everyone calm. For two days they endured the siege with little food but on the third day the water and electricity were cut. The workers had already broken into the dynamite stores. The (25-year-old) Sub-Inspector Pathmanathan in charge of six Sinhala policemen – told my father he had to have the necessary authority to open fire or he could not guarantee the safety of the women and children. My father, who was vested with the authority, had previously told him that under no circumstances was he to shoot, finally gave him permission. My father told my mother to tie her thali around her waist and be prepared to run as the mob surged forward. Sub inspector Pathamanathan gave the order to shoot and three rioters dropped dead and, as if by magic, the mob disappeared.

Pathmanathan later told my father he had been unsure as to whether his Sinhala policemen would obey the order to fire on their fellow Sinhalese in defense of Tamils, but it says a lot for police discipline, then, that they did. The next day, the army detachment led by Colonel F C de Saram arrived and order was soon restored. One incident worthy of mention is that a mob pf Sinhala colonists proceeding in commandeered GODB lorries to join the mayhem in Ampara was ambushed by Tamil farmers from the Purana lands (expert shots from the experience of defending their lands from marauding wildlife) in the newly opened Siyambalanduwa road and rioters were killed.

Dr.Usvatte Aratchi( later on the Committee to Evaluate the GODB) , then an economics undergraduate at Peradeniya University, was engaged with other students in a socio-economic survey of the Gal Oya valley under Professor S.J.Thambiah . The Sinhala and Tamil students involved escaped in a GODB lorry – driven, in Dr.Usvatte’s words, ‘by a madman’- along the same route! The few East Europeans in Gal Oya also escaped to the hills of Nuwara Eliya by the Siyambalanduwa road and shortly after sailed back to Europe.

During all this my sister and I were picked up by Sydney de Zoysa (a legendary Police officer and family friend) and driven through the night to the GA’s Residency in Batticaloa – I remember being fascinated by the Sterling sub machine gun he had with him.

The SLFP government appointed a Commission of Enquiry under a retired High Court Judge to enquire into the events that took place. They took extensive oral and written evidence from all parties and came to some firm conclusions: The Gal Oya Board was not blamed for the events, the Board administration remained in force even during the recent traumatic events, order was restored within a week when the armed forces arrived and pointed the finger at – though did not name – political involvement from a key party within the government.

The Report of the Commission was suppressed and, I presume, it is still gathering dust in some government archive waiting for a future historian. Maybe the new Freedom of Information Act can be used to unearth it.

 The riots ended ‘Camelot’ and broke the optimistic spirit that had permeated the Gal Oya Valley. A proposal to use the Board’s newly acquired engineering skills to build a dam in the Purana areas to benefit Tamil and Muslim farmers, at a very attractive cost, was shelved for no good reason. A year later the original Board was dissolved – I will tell the story in CP de Silva’s words in the next paragraph. CP had been a batch mate of my father in the Ceylon Civil Service – my father the first and CP the 12th in the order of merit at the time of appointment. They were good friends, and C P de Silva was by then the Minister of Lands responsible for the GODB and 10 years later as well the Minister for Agriculture in the later Dudley Senanayake government from 1965 to 1970. After a desultory Civil Service career, he had joined SWRD in politics and was rewarded by being given the plum Ministry of Lands portfolio.

Later CP suffered a stroke, and was in London recuperating in our house – at this time my father was the Acting High Commisioner in London when these events took place.

“Kanaks – I couldn’t help it. Philip spoke to Banda and said we can’t have a Tamil in such a powerful capacity as Chairman Gal Oya Board. If you don’t change him I will bring my unions out. Banda, being weak, gave in and that is why we dissolved the Board.” The government realized that they had done an injustice to a highly effective and respected Civil Servant and so offered him the London post as Deputy High Commissioner. My father, after a short break in London, where he sat for and passed the Bar exams with honours, accepted the offer for the sake of his children’s education, but he was broken man. His heart was in dry zone peasant colonization and above all in Gal Oya which was near to his heart. The glamour of dinner at Buckingham Palace and endless diplomatic cocktail parties bored him, and he died five years later of a heart attack during a game of tennis, while he was our Ambassador in Jakarta.

In 1966 the Dudley Senanayake government appointed a Committee to Evaluate the Gal Oya Project. It consisted of a distinguished set of people:

* BH Farmer – Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; author of ‘Pioneer Peasant Colonization in Ceylon’ and ‘Ceylon – A Divided Nation’; leading authortity on South Asia’; former Chairman, 1965 Land Commission

* Dr G Usvatte Aratchi, Central Bank economist, under secondment to the Ministry of Planning, who later distinguished himself at the UN

* T P De S Munasinghe – former Director of the PWD

* S Arumugam, former Deputy Director, Irrigation Department and an outstanding engineer

* D S de Silva – former Auditor General

* Tissa Devendra of the Ceylon Administrative Service who went on to a remarkable career in public service as GA in Matara, Trincomalee and Jaffna and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission was the Secretary.

* I was the Assistant Secretary

At the outset the Committee decided to confine themselves to a strictly technical approach eschewing the political dimension as many of the people involved were now with the government. The Committee would do a cost-benefit analysis of the project, agricultural policies and the secondary industries started etc.

After a year of intense work the Committee published their findings [Sessional Paper 1/1968]

* From a purely cost/benefit point of view the project was a failure. However, from a colonization, paddy production point of view the project was successful.

* The Committee chose to ignore the fact that the main objective was Sinhala colonization in the East – and this was achieved

* Total costs up to date and projected were Rs 1 billion while expenditure was approximately the same and, if one accepted a discount rate of 10% ,the net result was negative. I will comment on this finding below.

* The power generation project was a success even using the unreasonably low cost then prevailing for alternatives means of generation. The oil crisis was then far away.

* The returns on the improvements in irrigation and flood control of the scheme in the Purana lands was very positive.

* The sugar project was a disaster given the fact that the output of sugar cane never satisfied more that 18% of the factory’s need – but I have pointed out earlier the Board was aware of this challenge and proposed to bring in Japanese farmers (Japan was the still recovering from the war and was eager to encourage emigration) – this out- of- the- box solution was rejected by the government.

* The other projects like the rice mill and tile factory had only a marginal impact

* One obvious conclusion – not explicitly stated in the Report – was that by 1957 all the dams, irrigation works, land clearing roads, bridges, workshops had been completed and 70 % of the colonists settled, but the GODB spent the same amount over the next ten years to achieve very little. The GODB had a scheme to move all the equipment and staff to the Walawe project but this was not achieved due to political interference and unnecessary new infrastructure was created at Walawe. If the GODB’s activities in Gal Oya had been wound up in 1958 or 1959 and its infrastructure moved to Uda Walawe, as was the plan of the GODB, then the economics of the project would have been very different. Once again the culprits were with the ruling party now.

*The Committee also faulted the Board for being extravagant in the expenditure on roads, staff housing etc. But this had been necessary to attract suitable staff into the wilderness of the Eastern province, and the roads and bridges and schools built still serve this area.

The reason that the first conclusion was not correct is that in the eyes of the Project founder – DS Senanayake – the main rationale of the project was Sinhala colonization of the Tamil dominated Eastern province and this was achieved. This started the process – later carried on by the accelerated Mahaveli project — to change the demographics of this province. In hindsight the results of the Eelam war may have been different if this had not been done.

Also the Committee started with a low yield per acre of paddy of 30 bushels with modest improvements over time. Today the yields are higher than projected, the overall project economics would have been positive. I intend proving this by funding a study by the Faculty of Agriculture at Peradeniya on the paddy production in Ampara.

Today the Gal Oya valley is a peaceful backwater where all communities thrive – now with the third and fourth generation of the original colonists. The original colonists and their descendants now number a quarter of a million and had forever changed the racial composition of the Eastern Province as DS had originally intended. The main problem now faced by the Sinhala colonists is that their children prefer the bright lights of Colombo and the Middle East to the hard, but rewarding, life of farming.

It is a lovely part of the island and well worth a visit – beautiful paddy lands fringed by mature coconut trees and elephants bathing in the Senanayake Samudra are unforgettable sights. DS’s vision has been fulfilled and was achieved by Ceylonese administrators working with our own funds – no foreign aid was sought or needed. Foreign “experts”, no less than foreign judges, are peripheral to our achieving our aims. We need to recapture the self confidence and self reliance we once had.

The writer is a retired banker [e.mail: ajitkanagasundram@gmail.com]

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