Abundance or wealth is primarily an idea

Our engineers and other professionals arising out of this modern system of education have not figured out that the basic solution for Sri Lanka is to harness the sun for a national energy policy based on solar power

• Sri Lanka, solar energy and innovation

Today we in Sri Lanka are seen largely as a people without invention capability or the ability to make use of our resources, who depend on the inventions of others and who are now languishing in queues waiting for others to find us solutions.

While the main reason we are in this situation today is understood to be blatant robbery, corruption, wastage and stoogism, the key other reason is that we have found many ways to ridicule, thwart and seriously discourage any invention that will prevent us from spending our national revenue.

Once when discussing fossil fuel usage with ecologist Dr. Ranil Senanayake he stated that fossil fuel was a ‘Satanic curse’ on the world and equated it as something made in hell! He went on to rationally query why humankind has to ravage, dig and burn when there is unlimited renewable energy resources all around us which does not ruin the health of humans or the planet. 

The energy of the sun, water and wind is all around us, unharnessed as renewable energy and for 74 years of so-called independent Sri Lanka our engineers and other professionals arising out of this modern system of education have not figured out that the basic solution for Sri Lanka is to harness the sun for a national energy policy based on solar power. The range of inventions that can come up in a macro system of electricity generation through solar power is limitless. 

This of course does not mean that we sell lock, stock and barrel, the sun like the way we have done the rest of the resources of our country. Harnessing sunlight, a natural resource amply available in Sri Lanka for our national energy needs means that Sri Lanka should have developed long ago a national solar energy investment policy. This means a national policy giving priority to Lankan origin investors and secondary to foreign investors keeping intact locally the earning from this resource.

This further means that Sri Lanka deciding to have a national policy of reverting to solar energy, has investor conferences, chooses its investors keeping in mind that the investor gets his or her share but that the product is owned by the country, and that the entire Lankan energy based production from electricity to cooking to vehicles, gets managed from this renewable energy source. It does not mean that a company gets sets up here, uses the sunlight here to generate solar energy and gets us to buy the solar product at some high rate. It means the opposite. We generate the product with investor support and distribute it to our people and the investor gets back in due course as mentioned in the agreement what he contributed to the effort.

(In combination parallel wind and hydro energy could also be used for areas of the island which has those resources mostly).

Why has Sri Lanka not done the above for 74 years or so-called self-rule?

Why are we so good at non-using and condemning our human and natural resources? We lost the patent to the hand tractor because owing to lack of support the inventor went to another country. His invention flourished there. Apparently the person who created a low flying air borne contraption was arrested, met a foreigner while in jail and was taken to the country of the foreign prisoner once both were freed to perfect his invention in a foreign land. 

Recently there was the incredible narrative doing the rounds on social media of the Sri Lankan who invented a renewable energy based alternative to running vehicles. He had converted the car engine of a senior official, adapting it to this alternative energy source and was later charged with ‘tampering’ with the vehicle! 

Harsha Suriyararachchi, an engineer who three years ago developed a macro plan of how Sri Lanka should have an investor policy for solar energy conversion of the entire island for its energy needs said in a recent interview with this writer that he could not to date get the needed support from any policymaker or the related officials concerned. He had tried speaking to a range of officials for the past three years on a national plan to convert the nation to being solar energy focused. The full interview with Suriyarachchi will be published next week.

In the past two months we heard the term ‘system change’ being touted much. System change begins in each of our minds. If each Lankan mind, irrespective of what ethnicity, religion or social class or what position we are in, stands up for supporting a true national innovation mindset based change putting country above everything else, and learning that wisdom based diplomacy and international trade relations can be achieved as it was in ancient Lanka – Sri Lanka could make this current crisis into a vital platform for true and lasting positive change. 

While politicians can rightly get a fair share of the blame for the situation we are in currently, each of us are responsible for it in diverse ways. Many of us in Sri Lanka have no inkling of the range of natural resources we have which we can use in local inventions – if the media knows it the media is making a good secret of it. 

We have a strange craving for anything that is ‘imported,’ in direct contrast to some other countries who stoically seek out what is theirs. 

Hence Sri Lankans should collectively rise to question the current situation in terms of solutions – blaming politicians alone will only squander our peace of mind. Politicians are only temporary administers of a country; the actual owners and bosses of those administrators are us, the people. Hence finding solutions for true and lasting prosperity of the nation is ours primarily and the responsibility of developing tactics and strategies of working with apathetic rulers is also upon us. 

If we who are lawyers, judges, engineers, doctors, traders, academicians, media personnel, industrialists and all others in every sphere started learning about what is ours and what we have before learning what is of others and what they have, we will learn to respect, support, use and innovate based on this knowledge. If so even if certain decrees are given to squash such local innovations we who are in diverse positions will have the gumption to stand up for what is right. 

Abundance or wealth is primarily an idea. An idea blossoms into an ideology. Both the idea and the ideology begins in the mind. May we rise together to develop a national mindset of wealth creation despite the obstacles that surround us. 

(SV)