By Pabodha Hettige
The Central Provincial Council has come up with a new plan to prevent the frequent forest fires occurring in the area during the dry season. Under the new plan, a belt of cactus plants would be planted on forest boundaries to act like a natural wall in order to prevent the spread of fires," Chief Minister of the Province, Sarath Ekanayake said.
He said the plan had been agreed upon at a recent meeting held with the Forest Conservation Department. As the first step cactus plants would be grown in the Ududumbara conservation area of the Knuckles region.
It had been reported that nearly 500 acres of forest land had been destroyed due to forest fires during the last two years and this had also caused drying up of several main water sources.
Ekanayake said that they had already educated people of the area on ways to minimize possible occurrence of fires. So far the most number of fires had occurred in the forests bordering the roads.
Meanwhile, he also said that nearly Rs.93,000 million had been allocated for the development of a Kandy city and the central province.
"Large scale developments are taking place within the Kandy city limits and a lot of new road construction projects and moving of buildings are currently taking place," Ekanayake said.
In the near future, William Gopallawa Mawatha and several other roads in the inner Kandy city would be widened to four lanes to reduce the heavy traffic congestion.
The authorities are also in the process of moving Bogambara prison to Pallekele in order to enable better development in the city. One third of the prison constructions are already completed and even the chief minister’s office and several other government buildings will be moved to Pallekele by June 2012.
Responding to a query the chief minister also said that they have identified two suitable lands in Kundasale to construct the proposed air strip. " Once all the technical issues are clarified with the air force and the other relevant authorities construction could commence," Ekanayake said.
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