Excavation work involving the 27.7 km irrigation tunnel forming part of Sri Lanka’s North Central Province Main Canal Project was completed last week. The tunnel, one of the most historic and ambitious irrigation engineering projects in the region, will eventually help transfer water from the Moragahakanda system towards the water-stressed areas of the North Central and Northern Provinces. Its excavation alone has involved an investment of approximately Rs. 60 billion.
Completion of the excavation work spanning years of meticulous work is no doubt an extraordinary achievement. But it also raises a question that Sri Lanka has been avoiding for far too long: what exactly are we going to do with all this water?
The country, through millennia, has demonstrated its ability to conceive and construct major irrigation infrastructure. From the ancient tank cascades to the great Mahaweli Development Programme, Sri Lanka has repeatedly shown that it possesses the vision, engineering capability, and institutional knowledge to move water across difficult terrain and sustain agriculture in areas where nature did not necessarily make farming easy.
The North Central Province Canal is part of that long historical continuum. It is not an isolated project suddenly born from the political imagination of the present day. The Mahaweli Development Programme began in 1970. The concept of transferring water to the north central and northern regions has evolved over successive decades. Different governments have contributed to its planning, financing, policy development, procurement, and construction.
The project itself was advanced through the Mahaweli Water Security Investment Programme, supported by the Asian Development Bank. The first phase of the North Central Province Canal Project received Cabinet approval in 2015 while the 27.7 km tunnel contract was approved in 2020. The construction and implementation process continued through subsequent administrations.
That history matters because there is an increasingly unhealthy tendency nowadays to treat every major project that is completed as though it was conceived, designed, financed, and executed entirely by the government in office. A nation is not built in five-year electoral cycles; roads, dams, irrigation schemes, ports, power plants, schools, and hospitals often take decades to move from conception to completion. One government identifies the need, another conducts feasibility studies, a third secures financing, a fourth awards contracts, a fifth completes construction, and the sixth may finally inaugurate the project. That is how nations develop.
If every incoming administration attempts to claim exclusive ownership of projects initiated by its predecessors, the result is not only historical dishonesty but a dangerous disincentive to long-term planning. Why would a government develop a 20-year national project if it knows that a future administration will either abandon it or claim it as its own?
The present Government should therefore be congratulated for completing the stage of the project now reaching fruition. That is what governments should do: complete worthwhile national projects, protect them from political disruption, and ensure that the public money invested in them produces the maximum possible benefit. But completing a project is not the same as devising it. There is a difference between political credit and national ownership. A government should be judged not by how many foundation stones it lays or how many previous governments it erases, but by whether it has the wisdom to preserve good ideas, the discipline to complete worthwhile projects, and the courage to abandon bad ones.
The danger is that Sri Lanka’s political culture has encouraged the opposite behaviour. Each administration seeks to distinguish itself from its predecessor. Projects are delayed, renamed, redesigned, or rebranded. The political value of a project often becomes more important than its economic value. That is why this national irrigation scheme should not become a partisan trophy.
But there is another, perhaps even more important, question that must now be asked.
Sri Lanka has become exceptionally good at building infrastructure to bring water to agriculture, but much less successful in modernising the agriculture that uses that water.
The country is investing billions in reservoirs, canals, and tunnels, yet the final stage of water delivery in many farming areas continues to rely on methods that are astonishingly inefficient. Water is transported over great distances through expensive infrastructure, only to be applied to crops using ancient methods.
The problem is not that Sri Lankan farmers are incapable of modernising. The problem is that the system has not made modernisation sufficiently accessible or economically attractive.
A farmer struggling with the costs of seeds, fertiliser, machinery, fuel, labour, and uncertain market prices cannot simply be told to purchase an expensive drip irrigation system, install soil-moisture sensors, and acquire modern agricultural technology with his own money.
If the State wants modern agriculture, it must make modern agriculture possible. The next stage of Sri Lanka’s irrigation revolution must therefore take place not merely in dams, tunnels, and canals but on the farm itself. The question should no longer be how many hectares we can irrigate, but rather, how much food, income, and economic value we can produce from every cubic metre of water. That is a radically different way of thinking.
Drip irrigation, micro-irrigation, sprinklers, soil-moisture sensors, automated water controls, weather forecasting, and digital farm management systems should become as central to the national agricultural strategy as dams and canals. The objective should be to deliver water directly and precisely to the crop, rather than simply flooding agricultural land and hoping that enough of the water reaches the plant. There is no reason why Sri Lanka should be spending billions of rupees transporting water to the agricultural regions of the country while failing to invest in ensuring that every drop of that water produces the maximum possible return.
Sri Lanka’s ancient engineers understood water storage, seasonal flows, and landscape management with a sophistication that continues to astonish modern observers. The tank cascade systems were not merely collections of reservoirs; they represented a sophisticated relationship between water, soil, agriculture, and settlement. The modern challenge is to combine that wisdom with modern technology.
If the present regime wants to create its own legacy in the nation’s agricultural sector, this is the challenge it must take up. It must come up with ways to optimise water usage of ancient tanks through the use of technology, and the farmer should be provided with access to real-time information about soil moisture, rainfall, crop requirements, and market conditions. Water management should be based on data rather than habit. The country’s irrigation policy must therefore move from an infrastructure-centric model to a productivity-centric model.
Every major irrigation project should have a clearly defined agricultural transformation plan attached to it. If a new canal brings water to 100,000 hectares, the project should also specify how many farms will receive modern irrigation technology, what crops will be cultivated, how much water each crop will consume, what yields are expected, and how farmers will access markets. The point being made here is that investment in infrastructure should not end when water reaches the farm boundary. Indeed, that may be the point at which the real investment begins.
Sri Lanka has repeatedly made the mistake of treating infrastructure as the end product rather than as the foundation for economic transformation. The irony is that it is the NPP that planted the idea that a road is not development if it does not improve economic connectivity, that a port is not development if it does not generate trade, and that a power plant is not development if electricity remains unaffordable or unreliable. Likewise, it can now be argued that an irrigation canal is not development if it delivers water to farmers who remain trapped in low-productivity agriculture. Therefore, it is up to the NPP to create its own legacy by optimising the usage of the agricultural infrastructure pioneered by others before it.
There is also an important lesson here about the nature of national development itself. The great projects of a country should be larger than the political parties that build them. The ancient kings who built Sri Lanka’s great irrigation works did not construct them for the purpose of winning the next election. They built them for generations yet unborn. That is the standard against which modern governments should be judged.
One government may have had the vision, another may have secured the financing, a third may have negotiated the contract, a fourth may have solved implementation problems, and a fifth may have completed the tunnel. All of them, where they have acted in the national interest, deserve their place in the history of the project. That is how a mature democracy should work.
The excavation of the North Central Province Main Canal tunnel is therefore both an engineering achievement and a political test. It is a test of whether Sri Lanka can finally understand that national development is a relay race, not a political wrestling match. One political party begins the race, another carries the baton, and a third crosses the finishing line, but the baton will always belong to the nation.