Government capitulates on Port City; rain

gods make Colombo mega-flood-polis!

by Rajan Philips-December
12, 2015
It looks more like
capitulation than
compromise. Rather than
downsizing Port City as a compromise, let alone scrapping it as it vowed it
would in the now-forgotten 100-Day Program, the government has all but
approved the restarting of the suspended project at its bloated 450+/hectares off-shore footprint. News of the approval appeared almost
simultaneously in Beijing and in Colombo. The Chinese authorities are
pleased, and the Sri Lankan government has spelt out the next steps in
the approval process. Before long contractors will resume dredging,
blasting and digging operations in the Gampaha District that would
ultimately remove nearly 70 million cubic meters of sand and rock
(equivalent to: one mile by one mile by 85 feet deep hole) and dump it offshore across from the Galle Face Green. What Prime Minister
Wickremesinghe deadpanned as "few landfills" is a massive dig and fill
operation undertaken in one fell swoop, but for the interruption following
the January 8 election.
This is rape of nature, and nature will unleash its fury in one form or
another. For now, the monsoons are having fun in Colombo while
devastating Chennai and Tamil Nadu. A few showers are enough to
inundate Colombos streets and make it look like Venice in a flash. While
Singapore planners are labouring to create the outlines for a future
megapolis in Colombo, the rain gods are turning it into a mega-flood-polis,
as Lucien Rajakarunanayake inimitably lampooned in yesterdays Island.
The impacts to marine life, the shoreline, and the dredged and excavated
areas in the Gampaha District should be of huge concern. Those who
highlighted these issues during the presidential election have now gone
quiet under cover of their new ministerial portfolios.

Things could be done differently, a whole lot differently. Truth be told,

there isnt a whole lot difference between how things were done under the
Rajapaksas and how they are being done now. Port City is prime example,
but not the only example. The ratification process for Port City, as reported
in the media, is no more than political window-dressing: a 1000-page
Environmental Impact Assessment tome has been placed for 30-day public
review ending on January 13, 2016; the public can make comments (what
will come of them no one knows); the so called Technical Committee (is
this the same cover-our-backsides bureaucratic contraption started in the
1980s to give collective kumbaya approval to Prime Minister Premadasas
urban development schemes bypassing the ARs & FRs of old?) will
evaluate the proposal (so what has the EIA done?) and make
recommendation to the Committee of Secretaries; from there, for the final
lap of the ratification relay, Minister Champika Ranawaka will take the Final
Agreement to the cabinet for approval.
"Where does the Final Agreement come from?" you ask. Oh, the Attorney
Generals Department is already drafting the final lease agreement to be
sent to the cabinet (no room for reservations here for the AGD, unlike in
the Avant-Garde case where it needed multi-layered in-house and outhouse consultations to make the ultimate non-decision). The lease
agreement is reportedly expected to provide for a 99-year lease over 446
hectares of Port City. The apparently redeeming omission from the
Rajapaksa deal is that the Chinese developer will not get the 20 ha
freehold land he was given earlier. Politically this is quite a somersault, a
wholesale betrayal of the grand promise made in the 100-day Programme
one year ago. Now that the Prime Minister, sounding like Lee Kuan Yew,
has started to threateningly identify sections of the population who in his
view did not "contribute to the January 8 revolution", those who know they
did contribute should ask the PM as to who will take care of those who
betray the promises of the January 8 revolution.
The more serious question is how will the people, the City and even the
country deal with the fallouts from the Port City development and the
unfolding of the future megapolis? Last week, I alluded to transportation
and underground services as two major challenges that the megapolis
project will have to deal with. Drainage and flooding will have to be added
as a third challenge. Colombos flooding after rains has now become a
recurrent reality of city living. What are now passing inconveniences could
become major disasters if concerted preventive measures are not taken.

Chennais recent flood disaster has been attributed to both human

(reservoir management) failure to balance storage and water release and
structural drawbacks (overbuilding in floodplains and destroying drainage
systems). Structural drawbacks are already aplenty in Colombo and
onshore and offshore developments will only multiply them.
Inspiration and Lessons from Singapore
Inasmuch as Prime Minister Wickremesinghes megapolis vision draws its
inspiration and its planners from Singapore, there are also practical lessons
that could be drawn from Singapores experience. Singapore learnt by trial
and error in dealing with land reclamation and inland flooding. Extensive
land reclamation (25% increase in total area from 581 square kilometres
in 1960 to the current size of 723 square kilometres) and shoreline
building led to chronic flooding in the city that became particularly
significant given the islands equatorial location and propensity for heavy
convectional rainfall throughout the year. Singapore had the resources to
hire experts, including expatriate Sri Lankan engineers, to identify and
implement flood control solutions. Sri Lanka is in a precarious situation
having abandoned the time honoured urban drainage practices that had
begun during Dutch and British rules, and now aggravating it by
overbuilding with no consideration for drainage management. Port City
construction and other development projects will only worsen Colombos
drainage problems. Without a drainage master plan, megapolis
development will eventuate into frequent mega-flood-polis disasters.
Singapore was the role model when Sri Lanka opened its economy to free
market and global trade. But in the critical area of urban transportation the
Jayewardene government, instead of following Singapores example of
public transportation, embarked on a disastrous journey of privatisation
egged on by World Bank experts, who wanted to showcase Sri Lanka as a
success story in privatising transport. In 1977, Sri Lanka had a reasonably
good public transport system. What it needed was unbundling and
decentralization to make it more efficient and locally responsive, and not
its dismantling by an uncontrolled and un-coordinated system of private
buses. In 1976, one year before privatisation began in Sri Lanka,
Singapore began the worlds first Area Licensing Scheme (ALS) for road
pricing, charging single occupancy vehicles entering or leaving a six square
kilometre area of the Central Business District. The scheme was operated
by traffic watchers taking position in 34 overhead gantries. Now electronic
tolling has become common practice in many countries. Within 10 years of

introducing the ALS, Singapore completed the first phase of its Mass Rapid
Transit (MRT) system. Today, Singapore has one of the most state-of-theart, efficient, reliable and convenient public transportation systems in the
world. A key component of Singapores transport policy is the
discouragement of private car travel especially from home to work and
back. The imposition of high car registration fees and other disincentives
are not a budgetary exercise but components of a transport policy regime.
It is one thing to develop a Megapolis Plan using Singaporean planners,
but it is quite a different and more difficult matter to introduce and
implement a public transportation system in the Western Megapolis.
Implementing individual Megapolis development projects, without first
launching a public transportation system will only lead to traffic congestion
and gridlock. A first step would be to identify the agency who will be
responsible for transportation in the Western Megapolis. Who will it be?
The new Ministry of Western Megapolis? The Ministry of Transportation?
The UDA? The Western Provincial Government? The Colombo Municipality
or other municipal and local bodies in the Western Province? Singapore is
an island City State, 100 times smaller than Sri Lanka, where national
governance and municipal governance are virtually congruent. Not so in
Sri Lanka, and not even in the Western Province. According to Provincial
Chief Ministers, the governments new budget did not make any allocations
for the Provinces. Will the new Megapolis Ministry smother over the
existing provincial and local government institutions in the Western
Province? What will be their role, if any, in the unfolding of the new
Megapolis?
Another key area where the Jayewardene and later Premadasa
governments failed to learn from Singapore, while emulating its open
economy, was in the area of housing. Publicly provided, privately owned
housing is another key component of Singapores economic success story.
As an entrept economy from British times, housing has been a constant
problem in Singapore. From its inception in 1959, the Peoples Action Party
government set out to address this problem in a creative way. The Housing
and Development Board (no private developer) took over the business of
planning and building public housing, not for renting but ownership.
Homeownership was not merely facilitated but enforced by directing
employees to draw from the Central Provident Fund to pay their down
payment. What began as low cost, low income housing development later
evolved into upscale condominiums, but all under the auspices of the HDB.
Of course, there is a private housing market in Singapore, but the PAP
government knew that market by itself could not solve Singapores housing

problem. Is there an opportunity to channel EPF/ETF funding and overseas

employee remittances into homeownership development in Sri Lanka? It
might be 40 years late, but still worth exploring.
Funnily enough, even today the labour strikes of the 1950s are blamed as
the main reason why Sri Lanka did not become a success story the way
Singapore did. But the real failure at least in the areas of urban
transportation and housing began after 1977, when Sri Lankan
governments, while imitating its open economy, failed to emulate the
exemplary experience of Singapore in public housing and public
transportation. Sri Lanka blundered in creating state corporations for
industrial production, but Singapore played smart in leaving industrial
production to the market while keeping housing and transportation in the
public sector. What will happen in the Megapolis?
Posted by Thavam