Still Waters Run Deep
Annette Bingham reports on an environmental project in Sri Lanka.
At Rantembe Gorge where Sri Lanka's main river, the Mahaweli Ganga, drops from the central mountains to the dry plains surrounding Trincomalee, work has just started on the fifth and final dam to be built under the Accelerated Mahaweli Programme which taps the resources of the river basin for hydropower and irrigation.
The £800m ten-year programme has harnessed the skills of the international engineering fraternity who have used sophisticated instruments and rainfall and river data to locate the best sites for the dams and their associated irrigation canals.
Yet, time and time again, the new technology has led them to locations which were first developed many thousands of years ago by Yakkha settlers, and more lately by Buddhist cultivators.
A. Denis N. Fernando, Additional Secretary of the Ministry of Mahaweli Development, told History Today how workmen clearing the jungle for a dam on the Maduru Oya (Oya is a small, seasonal river), a tributary of the Mahaweli, uncovered the remains of a seventy-foot high earth embankment dam at the precise location where French, Canadian and Sri Lankan engineers had chosen to build the modern structure.
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