Six months ago, the bustling Sri Lankan fishing town of Hambantota was virtually wiped off the map by the Indian Ocean tsunami, Reuters reported. Over 2,000 people died -- most of them on a narrow strip of land that separated the ocean from a lagoon -- and more than 5,000 homes or business premises were destroyed. So complete was the devastation, authorities decided the town should never be rebuilt. Instead, Hambantota on the island's southeast coast would be moved nearly 10 km (six miles) north to a more sheltered inland area earmarked as the first of several model towns for Sri Lanka's post-tsunami reconstruction effort. To great fanfare, the country's president broke ground on the project on Jan. 19, less than three weeks after the tsunami. But today, rather than being held up as a poster town of the reconstruction effort, Hambantota is fast becoming a symbol of Sri Lanka's often notoriously inefficient bureaucracy and an advertisement for what is wrong with the recovery plan. --More 1312 Local Time 1012 GMT
