Gal Oya ෴ ගල් ඔය

The Gal Oya is a 108 km (67 mi) long river, in South east Sri Lanka. It is the 16th longest river in Sri Lanka. It begins in the hills east of Badulla and flows northeast, emptying into the Indian Ocean south of Kalmunai.

The river was dammed in 1948 as part of the Gal Oya scheme. The dam created the Senanayake Samudra — the largest reservoir in Sri Lanka, at Bintenne. Resettlement of the Tamils and Sinhalese people displaced in this scheme gave rise to among the first ethnic riots in Sri Lanka.

The Gal Oya project resulted in the formation of the 100,000 acre Gal Oya basin. This basin has since been used for cultivating paddy, chillies, sugarcane and potatoes. The Gal Oya National Park in the vicinity has a wide variety of wildlife including bears, leopards and elephants.

About Ampara District

Ampara is belongs to the Eastern Province. of Sri Lanka It is a remote city on the East Coast of Sri Lanka, about 360 km from the capital city of Colombo.Ampara is the largest paddy harvesting province in the country, and has the Indian Ocean on the east coast of Sri Lanka as a fisheries resource. Most of the civilians are Sinhala, while Tamils and Moors also live in the coastal parts of the district.

About Eastern Province

The Eastern Province is one of the 9 provinces of Sri Lanka. The provinces have existed since the 19th century but they didn't have any legal status until 1987 when the 13th Amendment to the 1978 Constitution of Sri Lanka established provincial councils. Between 1988 and 2006 the province was temporarily merged with the Northern Province to form the North-East Province. The capital of the province is Trincomalee. The Eastern province's population was 1,460,939 in 2007. The province is the most diverse in Sri Lanka, both ethnically and religiously.

Eastern province has an area of 9,996 square kilometers (3,859.5 sq mi).The province is surrounded by the Northern Province to the north, the Bay of Bengal to the east, the Southern Province to the south, and the Uva, Central and North Central provinces to the west. The province's coast is dominated by lagoons, the largest being Batticaloa lagoon, Kokkilai lagoon, Upaar Lagoon and Ullackalie Lagoon.