There are places in Sri Lanka where the story of the land and its industry cannot be separated. Gal Oya, in the Eastern Province, is one of them. 

Here, a 108-kilometre river that begins in the Central Hills and winds its way to the East coast has shaped everything around it, the largest man-made reservoir in the country, some of our most untouched forest reserves, a community whose livelihoods depend on the land, and an industrial history now entering an important new chapter.

It was also here, in 1949, that Prime Minister Don Stephen Senanayake launched the Gal Oya multipurpose scheme, the largest development project undertaken after Independence, to bring irrigation to the dry zone. The reservoir that it created still bears his name, and the sugar industry that grew around it began as part of the same vision. Development and conservation are not opposing forces. Gal Oya is proof of that belief in practice.

A landscape worth protecting

The Gal Oya National Park spans more than 26,000 hectares and remains one of the most natural, least disturbed wilderness areas left in Sri Lanka. At its heart is the Senanayake Samudraya, the country's largest Reservoir, where visitors can witness wild elephants swimming between islets in search of food: a sight found almost nowhere else in the world. 

Gal Oya is the only National Park in Sri Lanka that can be explored by boat, yet it remains one of the island's most unique and least-visited wildernesses. Few photographed experiences match drifting across the Samudraya as a herd crosses open water between islands. 

A small number of lodges and luxury tented camps now allow visitors to stay close to the Park while leaving little mark on it. For most Sri Lankans, it remains a place that they have not yet seen, and should.

The Reservoir and its surrounding forest shelter 32 species of freshwater fish, several of them threatened, and more than 150 species of resident and migratory birds’ nest among its islets and dead trees.

Rising to 900 metres, Gal Oya's rock ranges and wetlands are a striking natural landscape in their own right. The region carries deep historical weight as well, from the cave shelters linked to King Tissa in the 2nd Century Before Christ, to sites connected to the heritage of our indigenous Vedda community. This is not a backdrop to industry. It is a living system that industry must answer to.

An industry we could have lost

It is against this backdrop that the story of the Hingurana Sugar Factory matters. Closed in 1997, the Factory faced the very real prospect of permanent closure. Its revival, through a public-private partnership, was not simply about restarting sugar production. It was a decision to rebuild a domestic industry in a way that took the surrounding ecosystem seriously from the outset.

That decision has paid off, not only in output, but in the model that it has established. What Gal Oya Plantations demonstrates today is that a State-private partnership can be commercially successful and environmentally responsible at the same time. It need not be one or the other.

What a green economy looks like in practice?

The commitments behind this revival are concrete. The Factory generates 8.75 megawatts of renewable electricity for the national grid from bagasse, a by-product of processing that would otherwise go to waste. Factory waste is converted into organic fertiliser at what is now the island's largest such facility, giving local farmers a genuine alternative to chemical fertiliser and easing pressure on the surrounding ecosystem. Treated wastewater is reused for cultivation rather than released into the Gal Oya basin, reducing the industry's water footprint in a catchment that the whole region depends on.

None of this is incidental. It is the difference between an industry that extracts from its environment and one that works within it.

A community, not just a factory

More than 8,000 farming families in the Ampara District are now directly connected to this operation — not as a distant employer, but as partners who receive technical support for irrigation canal restoration, rural road development and reducing crop losses from wild elephants, one of the most persistent challenges facing communities living alongside Gal Oya's wildlife. The renewal of this Factory has, in a real sense, renewed the prospects of an entire District.

Growth without compromise

When capacity in the region expands to process up to 4,000 tonnes of sugarcane a day, that is growth that matters, both for the strength of our domestic sugar industry and for the livelihoods that depend on it. And, it need not come at the expense of deep-rooted principles.

Sri Lanka does not have to choose between protecting places like Gal Oya and building the industries that the country needs. The Reservoir, the forests, the farmers who work this land, and the industry now rooted in it all point to the same conclusion: that conservation and progress can, and should, move forward together. That is the tomorrow that we owe both to the Gal Oya region and to the country that it sustains.

The writer is an award-winning wildlife photographer and sustainable tourism advocate, known for his conservation work at the Yala National Park and for helping pioneer commercial whale watching in Sri Lanka

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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication