Sarvodaya chief slams World Bank, ADB over water

Sarvodaya Founder Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne last week slammed the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank for ensnaring the country in what he described as “debt traps”.

He said governments have become puppets in their hands. “The two organizations are the biggest culprits who are ruining the country.”

He requested the government to involve the people in their solution so that the people can “continue to have control over their basic human right to water.”

Dr Ariyaratne was speaking at the 32nd WEDC (Water Engineers Development Centre) International Conference on “Sustainable development of water resources, water supply and environmental sanitation” held in Colombo.

The conference was organized by the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka (IESL) in collaboration with the Loughborough University of the United Kingdom. Dr Ariyaratne was delivering the keynote address at the event.

“Be very careful of these international funders,” he warned, going on to advice the government to use the people of the country to help with their projects. Dr Ariyaratne went onto say “We also have established top-down, centralized command systems ignoring people’s participatory bottom-up management organizations.” “We have to get back to the ancient path of traditional water management systems at least in principle and incorporate those with the modern,” said.

The Sarvodaya chief said the Sarvodaya Rural Technical Services Section has completed 327 water schemes to benefit nearly 25 000 families in the last 25 years. This was done with the participation of the people with people helping to build and maintain the water systems. “To this day, to my knowledge none of the bureaucrats who advice the government on water policies has ever visited and seen what people have achieved,” he said.

Dinesh Gunawardena, Minister of Urban Development and Water Supply, said that sustainable development is a topic that has been discussed over the years without much achievement and hoped there will be new findings on low cost methods at this year’s conference. “Modernization has resulted in a huge demand for water,” he said. Talking about the action taken by the government he said that the government is placing special emphasis on rain water harvesting saying that facilities for harvesting rain water will be compulsory in all buildings that are coming up. Gunawardena also said that the long term goal of the government was to provide adequate sanitation and water to people by the year 2025.

The event, which is a global forum for practitioners, policy makers, academics and researchers from a wide range of disciplines in the water and environmental sanitation sectors, saw the participation of over 200 foreign delegates from Asia, Africa and Europe.