Flood Control, or Flood Creation?

A couple of days ago some of us were talking about all the changes that were happening in Colombo. As readers of this blog might have noticed, these changes do not happen without some heartache for many of us old residents, though of course the real impact is on those residents who are being displaced or losing their homes and whose voices are not always heard on the likes of this blog.  For them it is much, much worse.  But read more about that here.

Our recent conversation was whether the beautification, a component, albeit a small component,  of the Metro Colombo Urban Development Project funded by the World Bank and which is, in essence, a flood control project was being monitored in its implementation, especially its accelerated CHOGM implementation.  We rather cynically observed, that if the new developments had not taken issues of drainage into account, they could result in more flooding, which of course would go contrary to the whole objectives of the project.. and lo and behold!  not very many days after this discussion,  that is exactly what happened.  Last evening's magnificent downpour did cause several places to be submerged!

See the Sunday Times Photo Focus "New Look Colombo fails rain test" with story and pix by Susanha Liyanawatta and Hasitha Kulasekera.   Pictures below from the Sunday Times Article.






Wonder what the World Bank will have to say about this...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Will change come through red gates?

Image
My former schoolmates are pre-ordering their copy of a coffee-table book entitled Through the Red Gates, a celebratory volume of 125 years of Ladies College, the school we attended on Flower Road, which celebrates this landmark event in 2025.   Some former schoolmates (and others) are also agonising at the possibility that the gates to the country’s governance might turn red with a Malimawa/NPP/Anura Kumara Dissanayake victory in the Presidential election next week.   The fear of a NPP/AKD victory takes several forms: it evokes the spectre of violence of the JVP (the main party in the NPP) forgetting that JVP are not the only perpetrators of terror. The political space, since 1 971 at least, has been seeped in violence - the JVP of the 1980s was particularly vicious, but s uccessive state regimes have unleashed state violence and given head to extra-judicial violent e lements that were equally virulent.   As Lionel Bopage has said in a recent interview , the violenc...
Read more

Some thoughts on the White Saviour Complex of development consultancies

Image
photo taken from  https://e11e99.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/identity-in-a-post-colonial-world/ I am sharing some thoughts that I picked  randomly from a relatively progressive Christian facebook page (Sojourners)that I follow, mainly to help me counter the rather misinformed opinions of my true believer Christian friends (brown not white).  The article is called , 6 HARMFUL CONSEQUENCES OF THE WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX, BY RYAN KUJA  and is so relevant to the northern development consultancy space that many of my (white) friends and colleagues occupy (and that I too sometimes venture into) that I thought to use it to write a blog post that I can share with that community.   R yan Kuja confesses that he was "never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls"  but admits that "the engine driving [him] was the white saviour complex..... The other Westerners [he] worked with believed [they] had it al...
Read more

Year 2014: Buddhist era 2557-2558

Image
There was an interesting debate among colleagues that was triggered by the simple fact that I shared the official government calendar for 2014.  The Calendar has, as it has had in the previous year, and possibly many years prior to that,  the sub title -  Buddhist Era 2557-2558. This triggered a discussion on whether it was appropriate to have that on the calendar or not.  The argument against seemed to be based on it being seen as an imposition by the State of Buddhism, into areas that are perceived as secular and non-religious. [Though of course, as was pointed out,  the Gregorian Calendar is not really secular at all, based on the fact that it counts the years from the birth of Christ!] What was interesting was that we were having this debate at all.  Obviously, the current context has made us all ultra sensitive to certain issues, and the whole question of a state religion led some of us to be uncomfortable, others to be resentful (not overtly ma...
Read more