The govt’s time has come to LISTEN to people and experts

After several months of protests, the people of Mannar won their battle to save their soil from unplanned development projects. According to the cabinet decision on Tuesday, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake had instructed Power and Energy Ministry officials to refrain from continuing any major projects in Mannar without obtaining the consent from people. This is a positive development in terms of sustainable development, particularly because people’s consent is paramount when mega scale projects are being taken to rural settings. 
Sri Lanka has a history of robbing people’s lands, privacy and way of life as a result of unplanned development projects which had commenced without obtaining public consent. This is an essential component of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) which is often left out or ticked without obtaining consent from a cross section of people representing the entire population of a village or district, depending on the scale of the project. 
As a result, people are at the receiving end of floods, loss of livelihoods and other socioeconomic impacts which would affect them in the long term. In the case of Mannar, the already existing wind turbines have caused severe flooding during the rainy seasons, destroying people’s home gardens which are the only source of income in women-headed households and making people ill as their homes become submerged in water. As a result, children are unable to commute to school and, without proper sanitation facilities, women are direct victims in these circumstances. 
Another reason why public consent should be sought in such cases is because they too should benefit from such projects. Ultimately, these projects should try to address rural unemployment and other issues thereby up-skilling and re-skilling youth, retired individuals who are still capable of working and training them to handle new technologies and other machinery. This way, people don’t need to migrate for overseas employment, leaving their families behind. Women could be provided with equal employment opportunities to allow them to become self-sufficient because corporate social responsibility is an important component in mega scale projects,  and there’s more that could be done than planting trees in an unscientific manner and promoting greenwashing. 
Previously, Mannar was earmarked for another wind power project which was subsequently stopped following the pressure exerted by the wildlife fraternity and other litigants. The proposed location for this project was marked across the Central Asian Flyway which is used by millions of migratory birds during the migratory season. While there are plenty of other locations to setup wind power projects,  Mannar was selected for reasons best known by the project proponent. 
While a government needs to have a systematic approach to resolve issues faced by the people, they also need to be systematic when dealing with the environment. From rhetorics that encouraged farmers to shoot down animals that caused crop damage to a poorly conducted animal census to unplanned and ad hoc elephant drives, the incumbent government’s approaches to resolve the human-wildlife crises remains primitive. Recent attempts to forcibly drive elephants towards the Managed Elephant Reserve (MER) in Hambantota is a classic example of why this government needs proper advisors particularly when it comes to dealing with the subject of environment. 
It is true that farmer organisations in Walsapugala urged successive regimes to drive elephants towards the MER but the MER is a poorly managed territory for elephants to thrive in. This is because the MER includes several commercial projects including quarries and vegetable cultivations which would pose more threats to elephants and aggravate the human-elephant conflict (HEC). Environmentalists have argued as to why elephant drives won’t be the most appropriate solution to mitigate HEC. 
Sri Lankans have already experienced how a previous ruler became unpopular overtime, particularly due to shortsighted decisions taken regarding the environment and wildlife. So the government should LISTEN to the people and experts without always taking unanimous and unpopular decisions that would ultimately take a toll on their own voter base.

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