Draft:Dry Zone settlements in Sri Lanka

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Dry Zone settlements in Sri Lanka are state-sponsored colonization and agricultural development schemes implemented primarily in the Dry Zone, which is covers parts of the island's North Central, North Western, Eastern, and Uva Province. These areas were sparsely populated due to limited water, diseases, and droughts around the turn of the twentieth century. Post-independence decades saw much of Sri Lankan development investment channeled to these projects with the objective to revive ancient irrigation systems, reduce population pressure in the Wet Zone, and improving national food security.

Background

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Precipitation and irrigation map of Sri Lanka.

The Dry Zone, comprising roughly two-thirds of Sri Lanka’s land area—including the North Central, Northern, and Eastern provinces—was the cradle of the island’s ancient irrigation-based civilization. Between the 3rd century BCE and the 13th century CE, this region supported a network of settlements sustained by complex tank cascade systems.[1] However, successive South Indian invasions, political instability, malaria, and the abandonment of irrigation infrastructure led to widespread depopulation by the medieval period.[2][3]

Colonial plantation economy and creation of a landless peasantry

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Tea plantation (Dambatenne estates) at about 1800 m above sea level in Haputale, Hill Country

Following the ceding of the Kingdom of Kandy in 1815, the British introduced and expanded the plantation economy, focusing first on coffee and later on tea and rubber plantations. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1840 and the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 enabled the colonial government to appropriate large amounts of “unused” or “uncultivated” land as crown land in the Kandian Provinces. These designations often ignored traditional forms of land use such as Chena cultivation, fallow periods, and village-level usufruct rights. As a result, thousands of Kandyan Sinhalese peasants were dispossessed of their ancestral land holdings.[4][5] The plantation sector, which imported Tamil laborers from South India, as a cheap source of labour, rather than using the Kandyan peasantry increasingly pushed into landlessness and poverty, in the Wet Zone districts.[6][7] By the early 20th century, the Wet Zone saw severe overcrowding and the Kandyan Peasantry Commission Report of 1951 explicitly acknowledged that the displacement of Sinhalese peasants due to plantation expansion was a major contributor to rural poverty and advocated for state intervention through land redistribution and settlement.[8]

Early approaches to dry zone settlements

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Gal Oya Dam.
Padviya Tank reservoir.

The Dry Zone, despite being sparsely populated and afflicted by malaria, was seen as having significant agricultural potential it's ancient irrigation infrastructure could be restored. To this end, British civil servants and surveyors, documented numerous abandoned tanks (wewa) and proposed their rehabilitation as a way to bring the land back into cultivation.[2] The perceived failure of the Kandyan peasantry to adapt to wage labor in the plantation sector further encouraged officials to promote rural resettlement and agricultural self-sufficiency.[5] In 1920, the Irrigation Department was declared a non-revenue organization, based on the recommendations made by the Food Supply Committee and all irrigation rates were waived in 1926.[9]

With the aim of increasing food supply and addressing the increasing population density in wet zone, the government launched several programs starting from the Minneriya scheme in 1933, which was affected by the 1934-35 malaria outbreak in Ceylon. The Land Development Ordinance was enacted in 1935, which provided legal mechanisms for state land alienation, cultivation regulations, and hereditary land rights under a “permit” system.[10]

Population growth

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Population growth of Sri Lanka

The rapid population growth of Sri Lanka in the early to mid-20th century significantly contributed to the urgency and expansion of Dry Zone settlement programs. Between 1900 and 1950, the island’s population nearly doubled—from approximately 3.6 million in 1901 to 5.5 million in 1939 to over 7.1 million by 1953.[11] This demographic surge was most pronounced in the 1940s, when improvements in public health, sanitation, and malaria control dramatically reduced mortality rates following the 1934-35 malaria outbreak in Ceylon. The crude death rate dropped from 30 per 1,000 in the 1920s to under 20 per 1,000 by the mid-1940s.[12]

List of Dry Zone settlements

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Province Major Settlements
North Central Padaviya, Minipe, Huruluwewa, Mahakanadarawa, Anuradhapura suburbs
Eastern Gal Oya, Kantalai, Allai, Ampara, Dehiattakandiya
Northern Weli Oya
Uva Mahaweli System C and B, Moneragala
Central/North-West Minipe, Kala Wewa (linked to Mahaweli System)

Food Security

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ice harvesting machine at the middle of a paddy field.

One of the central objectives of the Dry Zone settlement schemes was to increase domestic food production and reduce Sri Lanka’s dependence on food imports. Prior to independence, the country imported a significant proportion of its staple food—particularly rice—despite being an agrarian society. Attempts to reduce the growing burden on the state coffer by cutting down the food subsidy, such as the rice subsidy, triggered the 1953 Hartal, since much of the population was dependent on the rice subsidy, while the rice import cost was ruinous to the government. The settlements aimed to transform the underutilized Dry Zone into a productive agricultural heartland through irrigation and land redistribution.[13] The implementation of major irrigation schemes, notably the Gal Oya and Minneriya projects and subsequently the Mahaweli Development Programme, facilitated the conversion of extensive tracts of arid land into cultivable terrain. These initiatives predominantly resettled landless peasantry from the wet zone, who were allocated smallholdings and afforded access to irrigation infrastructure, seed distribution, and, in certain cases, credit facilities.[13][14]

These settlement schemes played a pivotal role in the expansion of paddy cultivation in Sri Lanka. By the 1960s and 1970s, the Dry Zone schemes constituted a substantial proportion of the country’s total rice output. The conversion of formerly arid regions into productive agricultural landscapes not only mitigated the effects of international food price fluctuations but also advanced state-led objectives of achieving national food self-sufficiency.[15]

Environmental impact

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Dry Zone settlements contributed to national self-sufficiency in rice production and helped mitigate rural poverty. However, they also led to extensive deforestation, human-elephant conflict, and water management challenges.[16]

Tamil political opposition

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Dry Zone settlement programmes, particularly those initiated in the post-independence period, were primarily advanced under the administrations of the United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. Left-oriented parties, such as the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the Communist Party, adopted a more ambivalent position. While broadly endorsing land redistribution and the upliftment of the rural peasantry, sections of the left criticised the ethnic exclusivity and clientelist practices that frequently accompanied colonisation initiatives. They contended that such schemes disproportionately benefited Sinhalese supporters of ruling parties and, in doing so, weakened prospects for interethnic class solidarity. Tamil political leadership, by contrast, articulated strong and sustained opposition. The All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) and subsequently the Federal Party were among the earliest to object, arguing that state-sponsored colonisation reconfigured demographic balances in historically Tamil-speaking regions, particularly within the Northern and Eastern Provinces.[17][4] Tamil political leaders called the settlement schemes such as Gal Oya, Allai, and Kantalai were undertaken with the objective of implanting Sinhalese agrarian communities within areas historically inhabited by Tamils and Muslims. They argued that these initiatives undermined Tamil claims to a traditional homeland while simultaneously contributing to their political and economic marginalisation. By the 1950s and 1960s, settlement policy had emerged as a central point of contention, frequently raised in parliamentary debates and party conferences, and it became a catalyst for communal tensions, culminating in the Gal Oya riots.[17] Tamil politicians began to contested the establishment of settlements such as Mahaweli System L and Weli Oya, describing them as attempts to divide the contiguous Tamil-speaking areas and consolidate state control over contested terrain. The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) and other groups charged that the demographic changes caused by these policies weakened the collective bargaining position of Tamils and fueled ethnic tensions that escalated into armed conflict, leading to it being a key contributor of Tamil grevances that lead to the Vaddukoddai Resolution, eventually leading to the Sri Lankan Civil War.[18]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Panabokke, C. R. (2002). "Tank Cascade Systems in Sri Lanka". International Water Management Institute.
  2. ^ a b Brohier, R. L. (1934). Ancient Irrigation Works of Ceylon. Colombo: Government Printer.
  3. ^ Gunawardena, R. A. L. H. (1971). The People of the Lion: The Sinhala Identity and Ideology in History and Historiography. University of Peradeniya.
  4. ^ a b Moore, M. (1985). The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka. Cambridge University Press.
  5. ^ a b Jayasundere, S. (1979). Dry Zone Colonization in Sri Lanka: A Study of State Policy. University of Peradeniya.
  6. ^ Jayawardena, K. (1972). The Rise of the Labor Movement in Ceylon. Durham: Duke University Press.
  7. ^ Bandarage, A. (1983). Colonialism in Sri Lanka: The Political Economy of the Kandyan Highlands, 1833–1886. Monthly Review Press.
  8. ^ Kandyan Peasantry Commission (1951). Final Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Kandyan Peasantry. Ceylon Government Press.
  9. ^ De Silva, K. M. (2005). A History of Sri Lanka. Penguin Books India.
  10. ^ Gunawardena, J.; Somaratne, S. (2001). Land Development in Sri Lanka. Colombo: Department of Agrarian Services.
  11. ^ Department of Census and Statistics. (1955). Census of Population and Housing: General Report. Colombo: Government of Ceylon. 1953.
  12. ^ Caldwell, J. C. (1986). "Routes to Low Mortality in Poor Countries". Population and Development Review. 12 (2): 171–220. doi:10.2307/1973108. JSTOR 1973108.
  13. ^ a b Gunatilleke, Godfrey (1992). "Rural Poverty in Sri Lanka: Priority Issues and Policy Measures". Asian Development Review. 10: 164–198. doi:10.1142/S011611059200006X.
  14. ^ Peebles, Patrick (1990). "Colonization and Ethnic Conflict in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka". The Journal of Asian Studies. 49 (1): 37. doi:10.2307/2058432. JSTOR 2058432.
  15. ^ Moore, Mick (1985). The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka. Cambridge University Press. pp. 48–50.
  16. ^ Fernando, Chandima; Weston, Michael A.; Corea, Ravi; Pahirana, Kelum; Rendall, Anthony R. (2022). "Asian elephant movements between natural and human-dominated landscapes mirror patterns of crop damage in Sri Lanka". Oryx. Cambridge University Press.
  17. ^ a b Wilson, A. Jeyaratnam (1988). The Break-up of Sri Lanka: The Sinhalese-Tamil Conflict. London: Orient Longman.
  18. ^ McGilvray, D. B. (2008). Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka. Durham: Duke University Press.
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