A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

276 development dialogue september 2006 – carbon tradingwith SELCO for a pilot project on its Vijaya rubber and tea estate inSri Lanka’s Sabaragamuwa province, where over 200 families lived.It sounds to me like the perfect match. If Neeyamakola focused on the bottomline, what’s so bad about that? It’s a matter of unleashing the profi t motive forthe incremental improvement of society and the environment.No one expected Neeyamakola, SELCO or PacificCorp to operateas charities. The point is to understand whether such a business partnershipwas ever capable of doing the things it intended to do, whateffects the partnership had on the societies involved, and who mightbe held responsible for the results.So what happened?At first, the pilot project was to be limited to workers living in oneof the four administrative divisions into which the Vijaya estate wasdivided, Lower Division, and in nearby villages. Some four-fifths ofthese workers were estate Tamils living in estate-provided ‘line housing’.The other fifth were Sinhalese who lived within walking distance.In the first three months, only 29 families decided to participate inthe solar electrification project: 22 of Lower Division’s 63 families andseven Sinhala workers who lived in adjacent villages. In the end, theproject installed only 35 systems before it was cancelled in 2001.What went wrong?Two things. The first thing that happened was that, in the historicaland corporate context of the estate sector, the SELCO project woundup strengthening the already oppressive hold of the plantation companyover its workers.But how could that happen? Solar energy is supposed to make people moreindependent, not less so.This gets back to the nature of Neeyamakola as a private firm. Fromthe perspective of plantation management, the electrification projecthad nothing to do with carbon mitigation and everything to do withprofitability and labour regulation.Neeyamakola’s concern was to increase productivity. Its idea was touse access to loans for solar-home systems to entice estate labourersinto working additional days. The Neeyamakola accounting departmentwould deduct a 500-rupee loan repayment every month andsend it to SELCO. 114