Vision hidden behind the Design Features of Sri Lankan Ancient Irrigation Engineering Technology
By Mahinda Panapitiya
Due to recent climatic changes taking place at global level, world is now heading for a disaster environmentally, unless some kind of a middle path is adapted in economic planning of future development projects. How to define a middle path in relation to economic development is a research need. Conventional Middle path is a person specific point of view and therefore the middle varies from person to person, from nation to nation and even politically within a nation. However the middle path meant in Buddhism for development is universal and common to all the living beings.
Though the Buddhist middle path is conventionally explained in relation to spiritual development, material development focusing physical health is also stressed as a necessary pre-requisite for spiritual achievements. In order to understand this universally common middle path applicable to both spiritual and material development, design features of projects already implemented by the planners equipped with Buddhist Vision in its right spirit, could be used as an exploration ground.
Irrigation Projects which have been sustained more than 2000 years and still functioning in some parts of Sri Lanka, designed using the AIT, is the best entry point for that exploration. This is also a timely need because the projects developed during the last century using Modern Irrigation Technologies (MIT) in Sri Lanka have already failed due to reasons such as water and soil pollution, human elephant conflicts and never ending dependency of farmers for fertilizer subsidies etc. In the proposed exploration, modern tools such as circular economic models as well as Buddhist guidelines related to ecosystems management for food production would be used to analyse the visions behind AIT which contributed to that long term sustainability. Recently introduced management effort known as Water Quota (WQ) to partially simulate outcomes of AIT by decentralising management aspects of canal networks designed using MIT, is also discussed.
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Vision hidden behind the Design Features of Sri_Annex 1