Saving Nuwara Eliya

By Surya Vishwa  

Below is the ‘Vision’ of the Nuwara Eliya Municipal Council as cited in its website:

“The local government agency creating the most beautiful and environmental friendly city in Sri Lanka for everyone’s admiration.”

And this is its ‘Mission’ as stated in the same website:

“An agency providing high quality diverse services to its citizens, guests, institutions and other concerned partners, the way they want on time using appropriate methods and techniques through a friendly and dedicated team while enhancing and protecting the cultural heritage the environment and its greenery.”

Left to the devices of nature without man’s pollution, Nuwara Eliya would be truly a paradise. However, beginning with the pothole ridden, incredibly dirty, garbage strewn bus stand to the roads across the city, one finds the natural beauty of this city marred by anonymous littering that mushroom up every other hour or so. This page has published two detailed articles previously and we will publish those links once again below. Visitors come to Nuwara Eliya to enjoy the breathtaking beauty of flowers, waterfalls, mountains and the reprieve from the heat of the rest of the country but end up having to trip over garbage and smell burning polythene every kilometre.

Below are few points that sum up the garbage menace of Nuwara Eliya and the overall Sri Lankan mentality.

1. Non awareness and lack of appreciation in general of those residing in Nuwara Eliya that they are in an exceptionally beautiful district.

2. Ignorance that garbage thrown to waterfall areas and waterways would have disastrous consequences.

3. Non-planned and non-hygienic cramped housing which are on permit land, including mountain tops where garbage collection is not carried out. There are hand cart collections done by municipal workers in addition to the lorry collections but these municipal workers cannot keep up with the widespread irresponsibility by the public.

4. The municipal lorry arrives mostly once a week and stays stationed at the bottom of hilly centric areas for around 3 to 10 minutes where the duration varies. There is no civic consciousness by the people as a whole to segment their garbage diligently and to bring it downhill.

5. Throwing anywhere on the road and especially into waterways, random bottles, lunch-sheets, bags in which curries are tied into and given in eateries, beer cans and multifarious other items is a public norm. Old and young Sri Lankans calmly walk over large patches of strewn garbage anywhere and what they find unusual is when a foreigner or someone environmentally sensitive finds this behaviour disgusting. 

6. There are no consistent, daily and weekly public awareness programs carried out as merits the seriousness of the situation that borders on the overall issue that this country has no garbage clearance policy and no evidence that we have learnt from the Meethotamulla garbage debacle in 2017. 

7. It is the usual practice for people to dump their garbage in streets away from their home and sometimes this is carried out by visitors who come to Nuwara Eliya.

8. There is no sensitisation for the need to stop one time plastic and placing food substance such as curries in plastic bags and widespread use of lunch-sheets, a practice many foreigners find unpleasant as they feel environmentally irresponsible in purchasing such served food products.

9. There is no public consciousness on the need to find environment friendly alternatives to plastic and there is zero sensitisation by shopkeepers how they can hand over any purchased item without placing it in a plastic bag. The current practice by shops is to dole out a plastic bag even for a miniscule item that is purchased. 

10. In all of the research we have done for the past weeks on this issue we could not find any evidence that foreign tourists indiscriminately throw their garbage. We have found several foreigners who walk around collecting the garbage on the road and searching for a place they could dispose of it in the way they do in their countries. 

11. There are no public garbage bins in Nuwara Eliya for segmented categories of garbage. In Colombo one foreign tourist we interviewed said that the citizenry there laughed when she kept on asking people where she could throw her chocolate wrappers.

12. There are no strictly enforced bans on plastic in Sri Lanka.

13. There are no strictly enforced steep fines and unflinching regulations as countries such as Singapore adopted to transform a slothful, irresponsible slum-like condition to what it is now. 

14. There is no civil responsibility classes in our education system or basic awareness creation on what occurs when fire merges with items such as plastic which is why fully grown adults indulge in this on a daily basis in a city which is otherwise generally free of poisonous fumes as in the capital Colombo.

15. Although there is the general announcement made, when the garbage collection is done, asking people to separate their garbage and be responsible while disposing of trash, the general public is immune to it. A totally new strategy should be adopted if there is to be a serious impact. 

Meet the environment protectors of Nuwara Eliya

We will now focus on interviews with select residents in different locations in Nuwara Eliya. These interviews were selected for publication based on the genuine role these citizens of Nuwara Eliya play day in and day out to keep their heavenly surrounding clean but in the process make ample amount of enemies – often with their immediate neighbours.

We begin with 65-year-old H.D. Mahathun, an agriculturist and devoted ambassador for the earth, who has exceptional skills and expertise in fashion design, sustainable housing design and music. He lives in the vicinity of an exceptionally beautiful waterfall *(about 800 metres from Gayathri Kovil). The uphill route passing the waterfall is populated by dozens of cramped housing with weak sanitation where it is the norm for houses facing the waterfall to throw their garbage right into the water stream in front of them. When in times of strong rain most of the garbage gets swept away by the force of the water but even so it is possible to see assortments of rubbish stuck below. It is also common for these houses to burn plastic along with other items such as paper. 

Some households nurture small garbage dumps with food, plastic and paper combined which they periodically burn. Interestingly one woman in the area who takes great pride in her small patch of cultivation claiming that it is organic and feeds the produce to a nearby six-month-old child, seems totally ignorant of the fact that she cannot call her agrarian plot organic if she daily piles up food alongside plastic and paper and burns it. 

Mahathun is an exception to what is commonly seen as the ‘normalised’ Lankan behaviour; he can be often found picking up bottles, beer cans and plastic bags within the drains and waterway that gushes from the waterfall. 

“I just do it as a personal habit. I am a sensitive person. I do not upbraid these households who throw their refuse into the waterfall waterway as I cannot handle the stress of garbage related fights which is common if someone protests against what is the norm of irresponsibility,” he says. He points out that his sister was his opposite.

“When my sister was alive, she was a one-woman-environment police-unit and CID put together,” he laughs. 

“One could not find even a toffee paper in our area then. She was fearless. No one could speak over her voice. She was a 24-hour mother earth vigilante. She used to knock on doors and return garbage to people. She died two years ago and now there is no one like that here in our area.” 

He explains that one cannot blame the people alone and states that it is what we have all got used to because this is what has been tolerated so far. He opines that imposing strict fines is the way forward alongside civic education and related steps. “The only way to discipline the people is to impose strict fines and imprisonment. This is the only way and I believe this is how Western countries initially achieved high discipline where their citizens carry even a small shred of paper for miles so they can dispose of it responsibly.” 

We now meet forty year old Leana who spends most of her time in the wondrous Bambarakele area less than two kilometres from the Nuwara Eliya town where she manages a horticultural sales point linked to women’s societies. It is a popular tourist attraction, attracting locals as well, selling many types of plant varieties especially flowers. Leana, like Mahatun is a staunch preventer of the earth being contaminated but unlike Mahatun’s sensitive nature that does not prepare him to clash with polluters over the issue of garbage, Lena is lethal.

“I keep a very watchful eye every minute of the day on this issue. Nuwara Eliya is our paradise. I will leave no stone unturned to protect it. I will get the person to take the garbage they try to throw in these locations. We see Sri Lankans who come to buy plants try to throw their trash from their luxury vehicles. I do not care how big or expensive their vehicles are. I do not care who they are. I get them to remove their litter from my home-land,” she says. “We need to put fines as much as five lakhs or definitely over a lakh and then in one month this incredible barbaric behaviour will change. We need to introduce bins everywhere and for children to learn to segment their trash from the time they enter the Montessori days as part of their training,” states Leana. 

We now meet S.M. Nimal and his wife, both of whom run a very abundant flower growing enterprise. They are located on the Gayathri Kovil route. As I speak to them within their beautifully kept house where I notice books and simple aesthetics I also see the separate bins maintained towards the kitchen area. 

“We belong as all humans to this earth and have lived all our lives in this beautiful Nuwara Eliya. This is our home. This is where we breathe fresh air. We are well aware that national revenue from tourism can come only if we maintain the pristine beauty of our surrounding,” he states adding that he has made people get out of their luxury cars and pick up the garbage that they attempted to surreptitiously throw onto the roads and onto the water stream (Ela) below his house.” He reiterates what Mahathun and Lena had opined. That it is only fines that go up to even Rs. 1 million that will stop the nonchalant and blatant indiscipline manifest as a cancer in the psyche of almost every other Sri Lankan; where the craving to live in opulent luxury is paradoxical to the irresponsibility in throwing their own household waste in front of the faces of others. As we leave Nimal and his wife, they walk me to the gate of their meticulously kept garden, peer onto the road and tell me that they dread looking out into the road each morning fearing if they will find anonymous garbage which will be the first inauspicious sight thing they will accost at the dawn of day.