The village is almost entirely Sinhalese, the island’s majority ethnicity.

When ethnic tensions gave way to full-blown civil war in 1983, this small village found itself caught in the crossfire of a separatist conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – who were demanding an independent state for the minority Tamil community – and the Sinhala-Buddhist government of Sri Lanka.

In 1985, a woman and her child were killed by suspected LTTE gunfire close to the Mamaduwa reservoir, igniting a mass exodus that emptied the village in a matter of years.

Since the guns fell silent in May 2009, villagers have been trickling back in, but three years into peacetime they are yet to see an improvement in their lives.

"We are happy to be back in our own village, but there is nothing else to be happy about," 25-year-old Sagara Sampath, who spent two decades as an internally displaced person (IDP), told IPS.

Sampath, at least, has a job with the civil defence force, which guarantees him a monthly salary. But other villagers are not as lucky, particularly because the mega development projects popping up throughout the former war zone have skipped over Mamaduwa.

Most of the villagers here make a living by farming, though a harsh drought across the country has brought cultivation to a near complete halt.

Still, even when harvests are plentiful – as they were six months ago according to Sampath – farmers find themselves struggling to survive.

"This land is fertile, nothing has been planted here in the last 20 years, so even without any fertiliser, a good harvest is a guarantee," Sampath said.

But a bumper harvest doesn’t necessarily mean bumper profits. The faulty road system, which excludes Mamaduwa from easy access to local markets, allowed transporters and wholesale buyers from Vavuniya town, 30 kilometres away, to drive down the prices of farm produce.

"If the roads were (better), we would have been able to save some money," Sampath said.

Former war zone struggling

The problem extends beyond a dearth of transportation facilities, electricity, schools and health centres in the interior areas of the island’s former war zone.

Jobs, too, are scarce. The Central Bank recently stated that the North was one of the country’s fastest-growing regions between 2011 and 2012 – achieving double-digit growth rates as high as 27 percent after the war.