APRC and the Bioregional vision

by C. Wijeyawickrema, LL.B., Ph.D.

"All human progress has depended on ‘new questions’ rather than on ‘new answers’ to the old questions."
– Alfred North White, Science and the Modern World, 1925

Sri Lanka’s seven River Basin Units

Language-blind politics

The recent statement by the APRC Chairman, Minister Tissa Vitharana at his interview
with The Island staff writer C. A. Chandraprema, "…In the APRC, we are trying to avoid
having territories carved out on the basis of race or a religion or any factors like
that…[language?]" (The Island, 2/6/2009) is of historical significance. Empowerment of
people, rather than devolution of power to new sets of local politicians become a reality
by selecting spatial units which are language-blind. The political geographic importance of
it is further elevated by an equally important geo-

political statement made by the Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee, "...
Government of India has no instrumentality under which it can force a sovereign
government to take a particular action. This is not simply possible," (2/18/2009).

However, India expects Sri Lanka to accept what has failed in India for 50 years! India
wants a "credible" "devolution" solution in Sri Lanka, but does not speak of
"empowerment" of people. This is strange because, India did "devolution" (devolution of
power to state politicians not people) based on language in 1956, and it became an
unending saga of new demands for new states. Hardly a day passes without Indian
military facing separate state demands. Besides, the abject poverty of at least 300 million
Indians became an embarrassment to the ruling elites in Delhi as well as in the state
capitals. Therefore, as a remedial step India decided in 1993 to "empower" people at the
Panchayathi Raj level by the 73 and 74 Constitutional Amendments.

In Sri Lanka race (Tamil, Sinhala or Muslim) or religion (Hindu, Buddhist, Islam or
Christian) was never a serious political-constitutional issue. Instead, it was always a
language issue since the 1920s. Therefore, one has to presume that the enlightened
approach of minister Vitharana excludes race, religion as well as language. If territories
are not going to be carved out on the basis of race, religion or language, what should be
the most appropriate (scientific/legal?) and reasonable (just and fair?) basis for the
smallest spatial unit of citizen empowerment? This is the most important decision in any
new constitutional arrangement.

The term empowerment is used to distinguish it from "devolution of powers" because

devolution means simply sharing power with a new breed of political leaders. For
example, in India after the linguistic state boundary demarcation in 1956 or in Sri Lanka
with PC white elephants in 1987, the people (the citizen voter) were not endowed with
any governmental power. Instead, a new crop of politicians appeared on the political
scene (nurseries for the kith and kin of established-seasoned politicians). Empowerment
on the other hand means, giving people governmental power at the lowest possible
spatial unit level. The American, Kirkpatrick Sale described this as "human scale" in his
book, Human Scale (1980). He says everything works best if it is at a scale (size)
manageable by local people. This is akin to what we generally identify as "grass-roots
"politics. In a global village one thinks globally, but acts locally. Or, as the former U.S
House Speaker Tip O’Neil once said "all politics is local." Empowerment works best at the
"Small Is Beautiful" scale.

"God speak in five"

The Panchayathi Raj model in India is based on the principle, the Vedic tradition of God
Speaks in Five. Vinoba Bhave explained the Gandhian ideal of decentralization based on
Sarvodaya—the good for everybody—at the village level, "it is a common saying in India
that if five speak with one voice, it should be understood as the word of God; that is, our
ancients believed in working with the consent of all" (India: the most dangerous decades,
Selig Harrison, Princeton, New Jersey, 1960, p.316). Compare this picture with UNP, SLFP
or JVP supporters attacking and bombing each other at the village level in Sri Lanka!

Bioregional units and the Gram Raj concept

Sale spent decades tracing the phenomenon called the "human scale," but as a Western
scholar he missed giving attention in his research to the gram raj concept in Sri Lanka or
the panchayathi raj system in India. The village-level system of living and governance
that we found in Sri Lanka for thousands of years which was resurrected by the British
Governor Henry Ward in 1856, is similar to the Indian Panchayathi system, and it fits
neatly with the human scale discussed by Sale.

More importantly, the Gamsabava (village council) of Sri Lanka happened to be an

ecological unit that the Western industrial world is accepting as a solution to the social,
economic and ecological disasters found under the "developed" democratic capitalism of
the industrial world. Instead of big is better, small is beautiful is becoming one of the
solutions to global warming and pollution. Bioregions as political-administrative units is
promoted by a number of authors such as: Sale, Dwellers in the land: the bioregional
vision (1985, 2000); D. Aberley, Boundaries of home: mapping for local empowerment
(1993); M. McGinnis, Bioregionalism (1998) and H. Hannum, People, land, and
community (1997). A bioregion is an area that shares similar topography, plant and
animal life and culture.

Local government ministry

The Sarvodaya leader A.T. Ariayaratne’s 1988 book, The Power Pyramid and the Dharmic
Cycle (Chapter 7) explains how the Trinity of village-tank-temple worked as an organic
unit in Sri Lanka before colonialism crept in. Each village and a chain of villages
functioned with a river, oya or ela and one or several water tanks storing water
(hydrological units). Sri Lankan rural landscape is replete with thousands of such small
reservoir-based hydrological units. They encompass all 24 agro-ecological regions of Sri
Lanka. Brohier’s map of the Walve Basin is like a collection of hundreds of small tanks. In
the past people prevented flooding by this short river with this kind of water storage
facilities in the upper and mid streams.

After 1948, the village councils came under the Local Government Ministry, and these
Colombo agents did not help the VCs to become viable administrative units. Partition
politics ruined them with rigid central control from Colombo without financial, resource
planning or technical support. After 1978, VCs and TCs were killed alive and territorial
representation of people became a mechanical scheme at the national as well as the local
level. It is painful to read [t]he Report of the Local Government Reforms Commission
(Sessional Paper No. 1 of 1999, (the Abhayewardhana report) which discussed in detail
the "death" of the local government system. The report now dusting in some ministry
office argued with objective facts why the country needs to go back to the pre-1980
village council system. Recently, from a lawyer’s perspective, Professor C.G.
Weeramantry also presented Grama Rajya as a model suitable for Sri Lanka (The Island,
5/20/2007).

Flexibility in size and numbers

In 1981 there were 549 VCs and 7137 wards, (Abhayewardhana report, p. 452). Sri
Lanka has 319 AGA divisions, 257 Pradeshiya Sabhas, and 38, 259 "villages" (www.
statistics.gov.lk, 2002 data). Until the 1990s Sri Lanka had about 4000 GSN (grama
sevaka niladhaaree) divisions, which is now a mind boggling number of 14,009. By
selecting river basins/watersheds as the lowest village council level administrative unit for
Sri Lanka this GSN list could be reduced to an ecologically appropriate, socially equitable
and economically efficient number. The exhaustive water tanks inventory prepared by the
late Chief Justice Hema Basnayake could be useful in this regard.

Since watersheds/basins have a hierarchical order of progressively increasing in area/size

they can become a large River Basin Region at macro level. For example, seven such
River Basin Regions was proposed by the geography professor Madduma Bandara in 1987
in an essay in the Island newspaper. These could advantageously replace the present
arbitrary nine Provincial units. (ref. also, Chapter 4, in Fifty years of Sri Lanka’s
Independence: a socio economic review, edited by A.V. de S. Indraratna, 1998, p.83).
(see Map: 1. Yalpanam, 2. Rajarata, 3. Dambadeni, 4. Mahaveli, 5. Deegavaapi, 6.
Kelani, 7. Ruhunu). Sri Lanka will be an example to the world fighting with ethnic and
tribal wars if our leaders decide to come out of the box.

Under this spatial demarcation of river basins no unit is unusually large and each unit
gets it own coastal front. Each unit is interdependent by way of larger water transfer
projects already in operation. Thus the rain water falling on to the two sides of the roof of
the police station at Ginigathhena ends up in two river basins, Kelani and Mahaveli,
respectively. In Ohio, USA there is a county named Portage because Native
Indians/Alaskans coming from the Arctic seas by boats had to carry their boats over a
narrow strip of land to get into the Mississippi River System to go to South America! We
must not forget that the present PC boundaries came as a result of the decision by the
Colonial power to dismantle the Kandyan Kingdom. It had no connection with the history
or geography of the island.

While following a natural and not language-based boundary, river basin approach still
permits ethnic enclaves to engage in achieving collective public aspirations. For example,
in the Panadura Area, there are at least three large Muslim enclaves: Totawatta, Eluvila
and Sarikkammulla. Under a VC system based on watersheds these ethnic concentrations
can have their own VCs by a combination of GSN areas or wards in larger VC units. Thus
the Deegavaapi Region would be able to accommodate the concerns of the Oluvil
Declaration. Similarly upcountry Tamils can think of watershed units which are mini-
Malaya Nadus. Since the demarcation is by natural boundaries the threat of separatism is
however, erased from the political formula.

Mahinda Chinthanaya

Actually, the Bioregional approach is enshrined in the Mahinda Chinthanaya Program

(MCP). MCP stated in November 2005 that the ruler should think of land, water, plants
and animals as an endowment given in trust for protection and just use and not to
destroy or abuse. This was what the Arhat Mahinda told the King Devanampiyatissa. In
the West, the Roman Emperor Justinian codified this rule (Sax, Joseph L. (1970), ‘The
Public Trust Doctrine in Natural Resource Law: Effective Judicial Intervention,’ Michigan
Law Review 68(3) 471-566) and subsequently became part of the common law of USA
(by way of the Magna Carta in England) by the Supreme Court decision in 1892 (Illinois
Central Railroad v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387).

MCP activities under the Village reawakening projects are recognition of VC units. The
SLFP proposal in April 2007 to empower people at the Gram Raj level thus follows the
ancient Buddhist principles as well as the modern Bioregional vision. In the 1940s the
late Ven. Kalukondayave Pragnasekera Mahanayaka Thero experimented and
implemented a village-based rural development and crime eradication movement with
the help of Justice Akbar, Tamil vilagers and young police officer, ASP Osmond de Silva,
but the Colombo establishment at that time killed it and the Marxist Malaria aid workers
did not support it.

Why Sri Lanka needs Bioregions

Sri Lanka is witnessing today the adverse impact of unwise decisions taken by politicians
who are now dead. In the 1940s, Dr. S.A. Wickremasinghe was a lonely voice advocating
not to build one large reservoir but to develop a series of upstream small water reservoirs
under the Gal Oya development project. The economic and environmental costs of
ignoring his advice were enormous. In the 1980s the same mistake was done in two
projects. The Mahaveli project should have been based on smaller reservoirs but it was a
colossal waste of money at the expense of the rest of the country, where paved roads
ended up as gravel paths covered by trees even in places so close to Colombo such as
Panadura. The earth subsidence and earth slips so frequent now in the adjacent areas of
the Mahaveli could be due to adjustments taking place on the earth’s crust because of the
weight of the huge water reservoirs in a limestone region. The second blunder was to
have a new state capital just 10 miles from the old capital erected by reclaiming the
swamp regions in the Kotte Area. This disruption of drainage basins led to subsequent
flooding of homes even in Colombo 7! Thus we do not need examples from other
countries to realize the importance of taking the bioregional approach.

In New Zealand, a small country with small river basins like in Sri Lanka, local
governments units follow river basin boundaries under the Resources Management Act of
1991 (www.dia.govt.nz/www.stats.govt.nz). In North America, bioregional vision is
spreading in the face of energy crisis, pollution, water shortages and environmental
degradation. In the year 2000, a map of eco-regions of North America was prepared by
Robert G. Bailey identifying 63 such regions. California divided the state into 11 distinct
bioregions according to watersheds and specific flora and fauna and charted plans for
preserving biodiversity on bioregional grounds. There are now bioregional councils of
local residents and watershed organizations. The Province of Ontario in Canada undertook
a study in the 1990s to reconcile the various zoning and planning ordinances of cities,
towns and municipalities in its jurisdiction to develop a peninsular bioregion for the
Province. India has a plan already in place dividing the sub-continent by major river
basins.

Grievances vs. aspirations

A bioregion is an area that shares similar topography, plant and animal life and culture
(www.bioregionalsim.org). Because culture is a component shaping the bioregional unit,
the collective aspirations of people, even though it is a subjective matter, can be
accommodated within the bioregion concept. The fear that the Sinhala people have that a
North or North plus East regional unit would secretly work with Tamil Nadu separatists is
erased when larger units evolve from smaller watershed-based ecological-political units
of VCs. What Sri Lanka needs is empower people so that each person/citizen achieves his
or her personal and family aspirations in a system of fairness and equal opportunity
within a democratic framework. VCs based on bioregions provide the most effective and
reasonable vehicle in this regard. Sri Lanka therefore, already has its homegrown solution
instead of buying solutions offered by foreign agencies.