Your tax rupees at work

I cycled this morning, on my usual route around the Beira and passed the washing lines of the dhoby community in Polwatte.  The last time I did so was just before Vesak.. and they were erecting a pandol in front of the washing lines.

But this morning the scene was very different.  The whole place had been razed to the ground.  Bits of the kovil are still left standing, but they have been asked to move as well.

Spoke with a few of the community that was hanging around.  They have been given space on the other side of the Beira, behind the Singer Company.  They are carrying out their occupation, but they are not happy.  But the priest  in the kovil didn't think that it was a suitable place to site a temple.  He was walking desolately among the ruins of his kovil.

The people I talked to told me that the space was being used for a car park and a helipad for Temple Trees.   There is a Bo Tree in the corner.  An old man who had lived here for 85 years was seated under it.  In the past we were not allowed to destroy/cut Bo trees, but in this BBS era, not even a Bo tree is sacred (more on that later).

H M Mervyn P Herath’s book, Colonial Kollupitiya and its Environs, published in 2004, has this to say:

“On the landside of Galle Face, where it slopes down to the Beira Lake there  lived a small community of dhobis. They had been there since the Dutch times and, probably, long before.  When the land was required for the new Military Hospital the dhobis were given land for their houses and a “drying-ground” across the lake in Kollupitiya village on the land known as Polwatte.  The dhobis settled down there and dis their washing and carried their customer’s clothes across the lake to the Fort by canoe.  They even used donkeys to carry their bundles.  Most of the washing was done for the British” (pp37).

It would seem that the colonialists were more sensitive to the needs of this community and valued their services than their own government  does in 2013.   

More recently, see this from Groundviews’ Moving Image series 

 Darmadasa from Centre for Policy Alternatives on Vimeo.

The Metro Colombo Urban Development Project is being funded by the World Bank and implemented by the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, which should have some strong safeguard policies – though the World Bank could argue conveniently  that this particular section does not come into the scope of their project.

Either way, it is the loans that our children will repay or our tax rupees that are displacing these people.  Is that how we want our money spent?