What the Divisional Secretary said

In the hopes of digging up some information on Colombo's land ownership, for the imminent implementation essay, I met up with Colombo's Divisional Secretary. Though not much information on land ownership was revealed, the conversation shed light on a set of equally salient details of the state's (the Divisional Secretary as one of Colombo's main state rep

resentatives) position on inner-city children, provisions that are made and the general attitude towards streets and street existence.

I record my conversation with Colombo Divisional Secretary, Mr. D. P. Wickramasinghe as follows:

Q: Can you talk a bit about land ownership in Colombo?

A: I'll explain a little bit about the Colombo city area- under my control theres North Colombo and East Colombo. These are highly congested areas. About 400 000 people live here. Majority of land belongs to the government. Because in the beginning Colombo started out as a harbour and rail based city. The products that came into the port was distributed by the railway. Therefore, most of the land were allocated to the harbour and the rail. This, and the Colombo Municipal Council- which was the first municipal council. These three agencies handle all the general administration and the functioning of Colombo- that's why this trio of agencies are allocated large proportions of land in Colombo.

Though they are the owners- today, so many people have encroached this land.This has lead to densely populated informal settlements now forming micro villages. The situation is now so complex that no one knows in certain areas if the land is private or public, unless you make an individual inquiry. In some cases, when we make land acquisitions of informally settled areas, there are occasions where we find out that certain land that are encroached are privately owned by people who no longer live in Sri Lanka or diseased and survived by third or forth generation children who are unaware of their land. So unless you make a specific inquiry, there are no available data that allows you to see what's private and public.