Meetotamulla: Shameful failure, human tragedy

Meetotamulla children with national cricketer Rangana Herath in their temporary accommodation. (AFP photo by Ishara. S. Kodikara).

by Rajan Philips-April 22, 2017, 7:42 pm 

The shame of Meetotamulla is that for 40 years successive Sri Lankan governments have not been able to find a location for an engineered, or sanitary, landfill to deposit Colombo’s garbage. Its tragedy is that people had to die because a makeshift mountain of garbage came crashing down on their dwellings. The problem, in its simplest formulation, is that Colombo has no place to bury its garbage and nobody else wants to bury Colombo’s garbage in their backyard. Underlying this simplicity are vested interests, identified as the ‘kunu mafia’, who want to keep making quick and dirty money hauling Colombo’s garbage to any open dump within the City. The mafia does not want Colombo’s garbage to leave Colombo. At the overarching level, our multiple layers of government cannot get their act together and find a burial place not just for Colombo’s garbage but for all the garbage generated in the entire Western Province.

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