The location of the case study village close to the sacred ruins of ancient Anuradhapura and the new Anuradhapura city centre can be considered a source of resilience for the residents, but also impacts on irrigation management. Many residents are employed in a job sector connected to the ancient city, ranging from highly prestigious enterprises like UNESCO to various businesses in the tourism industry in old and new Anuradhapura. However, the nearby pilgrimage sites also have high water demands. 

High water demands by pilgrimage sites

The Buddhist shrines and temple ruins attract international and national tourists daily, allowing gastronomic enterprises and souvenir shops to thrive in the vicinity. These sites of pilgrimage and merit-seeking provide a favourable position for businesses for food and flower donations in the area.

Particularly Buddhist sacred holidays are a source of income but they also demand special consideration in irrigation planning. As water demands for ritual washing, flowers and the accommodation of pilgrims are high, additional water must be allocated and included in the plans of seasonal water distribution by the Water Board (institution responsible for tap water), the ID and the PID. Water usage in the whole area peaks on such occasions, which can lead to the overexploitation of this resource and therefore a collapse of water distribution, particularly in times of drought.

However, in a predominantly Buddhist country and especially in the vicinity of Anuradhapura, the centre of Buddhist belief, all administrative decision-makers are well aware of these holidays and restrict water use accordingly. As reported by village residents, tap water was only available for one hour a day for several weeks so that it was necessary to save the water needed for the day and store it. Considering the large number of Buddhist holidays and the vast amounts of pilgrims and tourists visiting the holy city daily during the holidays, this water shortage over a few weeks rather implies careful and detailed planning, since only water shortages and no cases of water unavailability were reported.

Outmigration to cities

In the 1930s, the Sri Lankan government made big investments in basic transportation, health care and education, which greatly contributed to the island being considered wealthy by Western standards of social services (Perera 1987: 33). Up to the present day, educational and health institutions are free of charge all over the island, which constitutes a strong source of resilience for state-supported marginalized citizens. Yet, due to the widened access to education, the attitude towards preferred employment has changed in recent decades. Residents from the case study village complained that the youth are migrating from rural areas to urban centres, mostly to Anuradhapura city, in search of "white collar jobs". Today, work in agriculture is associated with lower status and seen as dirty work among younger Sri Lankans, leading to an outmigration of young people from rural areas into cities (Ranasinghe 2010: 46). In Anuradhapura city, this is seen in the rising need for affordable housing, which the city inhabitants strongly complained about. The village residents, on the other hand, complained about the absence of the youth during periods of paddy planting and harvesting, leaving heavy physical labour to elders.

Proximity to Anuradhapura increases resilience

There is neither extreme urban poverty in Anuradhapura nor extraordinary rural neglect to be observed in the case study village. Even individuals living on the streets of the city had food and were not treated in a derogatory manner by other residents. The situation was rather the opposite: one could see wealthier residents bringing homeless people food every evening and having a short chat with them. As explained by an interpreter assisting in this study, Buddhist merit-seeking encourages feeding the poor, providing a further social support institution to the most marginalized. Therefore, due to the provision of universal health care, education, informally always accessible water and institutionalized Buddhist food donations to the needy, even the most marginalized are efficiently sheltered from conditions of extreme hunger or disease in the case study village and its vicinity. This increases overall resilience and lowers crime rates and other destructive and socially disruptive factors. Hence, the proximity to the urban can be considered a source of capital increase and contributes to resilience, especially in times of severe droughts or floods.