Deduru Oya Archives

The Garden in the Jungle (with apologies to Leonard Woolf) – by GEORGE BRAINE While the world is filled with fear and grief and I am inundated with news of the turmoil in Sri Lanka, my mind turns to a less troubled time when I lived in a garden in the middle of a jungle. In the mid-1960s, my father was posted as the superintendent of the Isolated Seed Garden (ISG), about 15 miles from Chilaw off the Puttalam road. The ISG, owned by the Coconut Research Institute (CRI) and said to be the first of its kind in the world, had been inaugurated in 1955 by Mr. J.R. Jayawardena, who was the Minister of Agriculture at that time. Its purpose was to carry out cross breeding of high quality coconut varieties. For this purpose, the 200-acre seed garden, also known as Ambakelle, had been carved out of virgin ...

Climate change: Looming threats to irrigated agriculture in SL-by Eng. Thushara Dissanayake Source:Island Sri Lanka boasts a legacy of massive ancient irrigation systems built by kings in the dry zone in ancient times. Parakramabhu the Great is believed to have said, “Let not even a drop of rain water go to the sea without benefiting man.” His words may have inspired the professionals in the water sector to develop the irrigated agriculture of the country further, harnessing high rainfall. Total annual renewable surface water resources in Sri Lanka is about 52 billion cubic meters (BCM), while total average annual rainfall is about 112 BCM. Since the construction of the Senanayake Samudra in the 1950s as the largest reservoir in Sri Lanka, organizations in the water sector have completed many new reservoir projects of large capacities. Lunugamwehera, Weheragala, Deduru Oya, Kalugal Oya and Yan Oya are some of the recent achievements ...