Dry Zone Settlements in Sri Lanka

Dry Zone Settlements in Sri Lanka refer to state-sponsored colonization and agricultural development schemes implemented primarily in the arid and semi-arid regions of the country’s North Central, North Western, Eastern, and Uva Province. These areas, known as the Dry Zone, receive low and seasonal rainfall and had historically been sparsely populated due to limited water availability and frequent droughts. The settlements were a key part of post-independence rural development policy and were intended to revive ancient irrigation systems, reduce population pressure in the Wet Zone, and improve national food security.

The Dry Zone, comprising roughly two-thirds of Sri Lanka’s land area—including the North Central, Northern, and Eastern provinces—was the cradle of the island’s ancient irrigation-based civilization. Between the 3rd century BCE and the 13th century CE, this region supported a network of settlements sustained by complex tank cascade systems.^[1] However, successive South Indian invasions, political instability, malaria, and the abandonment of irrigation infrastructure led to widespread depopulation by the medieval period.^[2][3]

Following the conquest of the Kandyan Kingdom in 1815, the British rapidly expanded the plantation economy, focusing first on coffee and later on tea and rubber. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1840 and the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 enabled the colonial government to appropriate vast swathes of so-called “unused” or “uncultivated” land as crown property in the Kandian Provinces. These designations often ignored traditional forms of land use such as Chena cultivation, fallow periods, and village-level usufruct rights. As a result, thousands of Kandyan Sinhalese peasants were dispossessed of their ancestral land holdings.^[4][5]

The plantation sector was developed as an enclave economy, largely isolated from the surrounding rural population. Instead of absorbing displaced Sinhalese peasants, British planters relied on the large-scale importation of indentured Tamil laborers from South India, creating a dual labor structure and exacerbating the marginalization of the local peasantry. Indigenous Sinhalese workers, who had neither ownership nor employment opportunities within the plantation system, were increasingly pushed into landlessness and poverty, particularly in the Wet Zone districts.^[6][7]

By the early 20th century, these pressures created severe overcrowding, soil degradation, and falling productivity in many parts of the hill country and southwestern plains. The Kandyan Peasantry Commission Report of 1951 explicitly acknowledged that the displacement of Sinhalese peasants due to plantation expansion was a major contributor to rural poverty and advocated for state intervention through land redistribution and settlement.^[8]

A prominent rationale behind early initiatives was the view that the Dry Zone, despite being sparsely populated and afflicted by malaria, had significant agricultural potential if its ancient irrigation infrastructure could be restored. British civil servants and surveyors, documented numerous abandoned tanks (wewa) and proposed their rehabilitation as a way to bring the land back into cultivation.^[2] The perceived failure of the Kandyan peasantry to adapt to wage labor in the plantation sector further encouraged officials to promote rural resettlement and agricultural self-sufficiency.^[5] In 1920, the Irrigation Department was declared a non-revenue organization, based on the recommendations made by the Food Supply Committee and all irrigation rates were waived off in 1926.^[9]

With the aim of increasing food supply and addressing the increasing population density in wet zone, the government launched several programs starting from the Minneriya scheme in 1933, which was affected by the 1934-35 malaria outbreak in Ceylon. The Land Development Ordinance was enacted in 1935, which provided legal mechanisms for state land alienation, cultivation regulations, and hereditary land rights under a “permit” system.^[10]

The rapid population growth of Sri Lanka in the early to mid-20th century significantly contributed to the urgency and expansion of Dry Zone settlement programs. Between 1900 and 1950, the island’s population nearly doubled—from approximately 3.6 million in 1901 to 5.5 million in 1939 to over 7.1 million by 1953.^[11] This demographic surge was most pronounced in the 1940s, when improvements in public health, sanitation, and malaria control dramatically reduced mortality rates following the 1934-35 malaria outbreak in Ceylon. The crude death rate dropped from 30 per 1,000 in the 1920s to under 20 per 1,000 by the mid-1940s.^[12]

The post–World War II baby boom further intensified the population pressure in the agriculturally saturated Wet Zone, where average landholdings had already become fragmented and insufficient for subsistence agriculture. Rural districts such as Kegalle, Kandy, and Matale experienced extreme land scarcity, with plots becoming progressively smaller and less economically viable with each generation. This phenomenon contributed to underemployment, food insecurity, and social discontent, particularly among the rural Sinhalese population.^[4]

In response, the state turned to the relatively uninhabited but historically productive lands of the Dry Zone. Planners and politicians increasingly viewed colonization schemes as both a demographic safety valve and an agricultural strategy to resettle surplus populations from the Wet Zone, thereby easing social pressure and expanding rice cultivation.^[3]

One of the central objectives of the Dry Zone settlement schemes was to increase domestic food production and reduce Sri Lanka’s dependence on food imports. Prior to independence, the country imported a significant proportion of its staple food—particularly rice—despite being an agrarian society. Attempts to reduce the growing burden on state coffer by cutting down the food subsidy such as the rice subsidy trigger the 1953 Hartal, since much of the population was dependant on the rice subsidy, while the rice import cost was ruinous to the government. The settlements aimed to transform the underutilized Dry Zone into a productive agricultural heartland through irrigation and land redistribution.^[13]

The establishment of major irrigation schemes such as the Gal Oya, Minneriya, and later the Mahaweli Development Programme allowed thousands of hectares of previously arid land to be brought under cultivation. Settlers, primarily landless peasants from wet zone districts, were allocated smallholdings and provided with access to water, seeds, and in some cases, credit facilities.^[13][14]

These initiatives contributed significantly to the expansion of paddy cultivation in Sri Lanka. By the 1960s and 1970s, the Dry Zone settlements accounted for a large share of national rice production. The transformation of these areas into productive agricultural zones helped buffer the country against global food price shocks and supported efforts toward national food self-sufficiency.^[15]

In addition to rice, some settlers diversified into other crops such as chillies, onions, and legumes, contributing to rural incomes and local food availability. However, the success of these schemes varied across regions due to differences in soil quality, irrigation reliability, and administrative capacity. While some projects achieved their goals, others suffered from poor planning and uneven resource distribution.^[16]

Dry Zone settlements contributed to national self-sufficiency in rice production and helped mitigate rural poverty. However, they also led to extensive deforestation, human-elephant conflict, and water management challenges.^[17]

Dry Zone settlement schemes, especially those implemented after independence, were pursued by ruling parties that were in government, which were the United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. Leftist movements, including the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the Communist Party, were more ambivalent in their stance. While generally supportive of land redistribution and peasant upliftment, some left leaders criticized the ethnic exclusivity and clientelist politics associated with colonization schemes. They argued that these programs often favored loyal Sinhalese constituents of ruling parties and undermined interethnic class solidarity.^[4] Sri Lanka’s Tamil leadership generated strong political opposition; the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC) and later the Federal Party, were among the first to raise objections. These parties argued that state-sponsored colonization altered the demographic balance in historically Tamil-speaking areas, especially in the Northern and Eastern provinces.^[18]

Tamil leaders asserted that projects like the Gal Oya, Allai, and Kantalai schemes were implemented with the implicit aim of embedding Sinhalese farming communities within traditional Tamil and Muslim areas. According to these critics, this weakened the claims of Tamils to their traditional homeland and facilitated their political and economic marginalization. The settlement policies became a central grievance articulated in parliamentary debates and at party conferences throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and led to the Gal Oya riots.^[18]

During the 1970s and 1980s, Tamil politicians increasingly contested the establishment of settlements such as Mahaweli System L and Weli Oya, describing them as attempts to divide the contiguous Tamil-speaking areas and consolidate state control over contested terrain. The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) and other groups charged that the demographic changes caused by these policies weakened the collective bargaining position of Tamils and fueled ethnic tensions that escalated into armed conflict, leading to it being a key contributor of Tamil grevances that lead to the Vaddukoddai Resolution.^[19]

Tamil political leaders advocated for a halt to state-led resettlement in the North and East until a comprehensive agreement was reached to respect traditional land rights and to protect the demographic balance of the area. These led to a long-drawn-out Sri Lankan Civil War. The legacy of these contested settlement policies continues to inform ethnic relations and political negotiations in post-war Sri Lanka.^[18]

• Agriculture in Sri Lanka