Mahaweli Water Resources Project

The Mahaweli Ganga is the most important river in Sri Lanka with a basin area equivalent to fifteen per cent of the country's land and carries the largest volume of discharge. A Master Plan for a comprehensive water resources development of the Mahaweli Basin was drawn up in 1968, and the work on a compressed but accelerated version of this plan was begun in 1977. This programme consisted of constructing the Kotmale, Victoria, Randenigala, Rantembe, and Maduru Oya multipurpose reservoirs. The new and existing land irrigated by water stored in these reservoirs was diverted into irrigation systems. Each irrigation system was designated by an alphabetic letter (Systems A to H). This paper describes briefly the multipurpose projects and the complex distribution network that serves the irrigation systems under the Mahaweli Development Programme.