Dilrook Kannangara

Despite its natural formation including its depth, historical economic use – the world has changed vastly since then, very limited modern economic current use and continuing military and fisheries utility, Trincomalee port and the region has no economic potential. All profitable ports are either on world’s largest shipping lanes or just adjacent to them. Trincomalee has neither, and that seals its fate.

But how about its heavy engineering potential, both as an enabler of other industries and as a heavy industrial hub itself?

There are successful offshore and onshore heavy industrial facilities around the world but they have other enablers that made them. One main industry is petroleum and chemical extraction. Trincomalee has zero potential in this regard. There are no known petroleum or other resources in the Bay in commercially useful quantities so no potential there. The other is developing Trincomalee as a heavy engineering hub. This has even less potential as Sri Lanka has no heavy industrial base on one hand and on the other deep draft ports far away from industrial bases offer no usefulness in modern engineering. All successful heavy industrial ports are in nations with a heavy industrial base. Sri Lanka is thousands of kilometers from them and has no industrial base at all. Colombo Dockyard is currently engaged in profitable commercial ventures and they may expand in operations if such expansion is profitable including Trinco if that is feasible. This is a commercial venture but is not worth any government investments. In addition, modern ship building and testing have changed from older methods. There is no utility of Trinco port in this regard whatsoever for the builders.

There are examples from North Korea to Zimbabwe of white elephants being built with just hope in sufficient supply. Wasting public funds to build cricket stadiums hoping for matches to come there in sustainable numbers, building ghost cities hoping for people to come and live there and building seven-lane highways hoping for traffic to come have been proven disasters across the world, particularly driven by a now outdated economic system. Instead, the right thing to do is to profitably enhance support for existing businesses helping them grow and branch out to new arenas where the investment amount can be recovered by the government within a short period of time. The government should never invest in any venture run commercially elsewhere if no commercial entity has invested in them in Sri Lanka. They have done their due diligence and found them to be duds; hence, they avoid it and save themselves from certain bankruptcy. With a continuing trade deficit since 1977, a continuing budget deficit since the 1980s and a looming 2027 end to temporary debt relief, Sri Lanka has no funds to waste. If commercial entities want to invest, that is great – let them subject to environmental concerns and national security concerns. This does not rule out foreign military or military-aligned investments; however, they will unfortunately drag Sri Lanka into their wars.