Features

Further on Budget Speech: Cost of living, public debt and collective responsibility

Published

4 years ago

2021/12/6

By Dr Laksiri Fernando

Minister of Finance Basil Rajapaksa is correct in identifying ‘international drug mafia,’ and ‘fraudulent business operations’ as challenges to the country, whether it should be stated in a Budget Speech or not. However, just after that and on the same breadth he is castigating ‘social activists’ and ‘civil society’ organisations as forces detrimental to the country, saying the following.

“Similarly, agents of foreign powers disguised as social activists are exerting a considerable pressure on our society to the extent that, today, such so called activism can overthrow strong and populist governments. It is not possible for a government alone to manage. Therefore, I invite all citizens of this country as responsible citizens to be vigilant about this situation.” (p.10).

While he characterises the social activists and civil society organisations as ‘agents of foreign powers,’ most worrying is the call for government supporters to act as ‘vigilante groups.’ That is the meaning of the last sentence. It is rather funny this is stated by an American citizen! Of course, no one should agitate to overthrow an elected government by force or violence. But call for harmful policies to be terminated, ineffective Ministers to resign, or for an early election to be held is within democratic parameters.

Cost of Living

The Budget speech has taken the price inflation, affecting the cost of living, as a major challenge. That is commendable. The answer given however is the following.

“We believe that matters, such as, changes in consumption patterns, inadequate increase in production yield, inability to adapt to modern technology, issues with transportation and storage, the impact of intermediaries, and the asymmetry of information, within the production chain have all contributed to rising commodity prices.” (Para 4.5).

“We have to accept that the increase in prices is due to a shortage of goods, the imposition of import restrictions, the overreliance on imports, the depreciation of the rupee together with the failure to adequately encourage manufacturers.” (Para 4.6).

It is simple economics to consider inflation in any country a function of demand (pull factor) and supply (push factor). If the first paragraph gives reasons in the domestic context, the second is primarily relates to external factors. However, it is wrong to begin with or blame ‘changes in consumption patterns’ for the ‘rising commodity prices.’

The author (whoever) should have made a distinction between the (luxury) demands of the rich, and the essential needs of the poor or the ordinary. The country’s problem at present is particularly the latter. Of course, there is a rising demand even on the part of the poor and middle classes because of population expansion and people’s desire to have healthy and quality foods and goods. Leisure and entertainment also are their needs.

It is not wrong to identify ‘inadequate increase in production, inability to adapt modern technology, issues of transportation and storage, interference (not impact) of intermediaries and asymmetry of information’ as contributory factors for the shortages of supplies. If we particularly refer to the agricultural sector (rice, grains, vegetables, fruits etc.), the Minister should have frankly admitted to ‘organic fertilizer’ blunder more than anything else for the present inflation and food crisis. That is not done. It was a blunder because of its unplanned and haphazard nature.

On the external side, there is nothing wrong in identifying ‘overreliance on imports, depreciation of the rupee, imposition of import restrictions’ as reasons for shortages and increase in prices. However, restrictions on the importation of luxury items not only necessary to soften the balance of payments, but also to ease the rupee deprecation under the present circumstances. These have not been in the horizon of the Budget Speech at all.

When we take the Consumer Price Index (CPI) even as a conservative reflection of people’s cost of living, the present conditions are appalling. From January to November this year, the CPI has increased from 138.7 points to 150.7 points, by 12 points.

Consumer Price Index, January-November 2021

In a budget speech when problems are identified, clear solutions also should be proposed or offered. Otherwise, there is no purpose of a speech. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Public Debt and Foreign Exchange

It is partly understandable that public debt (foreign and domestic) going over 100 percent of the GDP during the civil war even though some of the loans and procurements were excessive and harmful to the country. This is something that had to be resolved thereafter. This was not done and in addition many new loans were procured mainly from China and others in the name of ports, airports, and roads. Benefits of these are long term.

There was no five-year plan or similar although this was requested by coalition partners of the UPFA (United People’s Freedom Alliance). Production, entrepreneurship, and businesses should have been promoted through public-private partnership, and through the private sector, before going into particularly largescale ports and roads. Promotion of production and infrastructure should go hand in hand, not one after the other. The partner parties, particularly the Left, also should be blamed for their lethargy or not taking necessary action to pressure or breakaway. Constructive independence is extremely important to the Left.

Of course, there are some developed or high capitalist countries who allow debt to go over the GDP. The US (128 percent) and Japan (235 percent) are two such countries. This is like big businesses taking loans even exceeding their assets and doing their rollovers. However small businesses cannot do so, or not allowed to do so, because their basic capacities are limited.

Likewise, the poor or just developing countries cannot afford to take major stakes in respect of loans and debt. They can easily get into a debt trap, to mean taking more and more loans to pay back the interests and loans. Sri Lanka at present is within this trap.

How has the Finance Minister explained the present debt question to the people? The following was his explanation:

“In 2014, when President Mahinda Rajapaksa handed over the country to the previous government, the total debt of the country stood at Rs. 7,487 billion. It was 72.3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.

When the present President came to power at the end of 2019, public debt had increased to Rs. 13,032 billion. That is how the government of good governance had created debt.” (p. 14).

Is this correct or not? This is something that the Opposition should explain to the people frankly. Champika Ranawaka, a perennial political jumper, has at least tried an explanation (Colombo Telegraph, ‘Development and Loans,’ 2 December 2021). After arguing that Sri Lanka’s debt trap is mainly due to the high interest commercial borrowings with no concessions over repay period, he says the following.

“Accordingly, the 8% borrowings which were rigid and high interest at the start of Mahinda Rajapaksha regime became 47% by the end of 2015. As a result the country went in to a vicious cycle from 2016 to borrow from commercial lenders for a high interest without any concessional period to repay. by the end of 2019 the percentage became 58%. further, a sizable proportion of those borrowings were to repay previous debts.”

Collective Responsibility

When Ranawaka blames the Rajapaksa regime for taking high commercial loans during 2005-2015 period and increasing it from 8 percent of the GDP to 47 percent, he also should take the collective responsibility as mainly the Minister of Power and Energy during the period at the end.

Again, when he says the country went into a vicious cycle of commercial debt from 2016 onwards and it became 58 percent of the GDP in 2019 (excluding other and rupee loans), he again should take the responsibility as the Minister of Megapolis and Western Development. This is not to mention the Bond Scam.

I use the term ‘collective responsibility’ in this article not only in the traditional cabinet sense. On the question of debt trap, forex bankruptcy, high cost of living, balance of trade, balance of payments etc. both main parties of the so-called political divide are ‘collectively responsible’ to the country and the people. No one should or could escape from that responsibility.

At present, Sri Lanka’s external debt trap is mainly due to the commercial loans primarily obtained through International Sovereign Bonds (ISB) from international capital markets with high interest rates (around 6-8 percent) and without concessionary periods. The stubborn refusal to go before the IMF is another reason for the present debt crisis.

It was in 2007, during the Yahapalana regime, that the first ISBs worth $ 500 million was raised and then continued during the same period and by the present Rajapaksa regime to cover foreign expenses and previous loans. These commercial loans which was only 2.5 percent of all foreign loans in 2004, became 56 percent by the end of 2019 (See Umesh Moramudali, ‘Sri Lanka’s Foreign Debt Crisis Could Get Critical in 2021,’ 9 February 2021, The Diplomat).

Even in covering the day-to-day internal government expenses, both regimes had to rely on Treasury Bills and Bonds in auctions and allowing direct participation. Because the Treasury is always running out of funds, without a proper tax system in the country and almost all state enterprises are lost making entities. Since January 2020, over 150 auctions/issuances have been conducted for Treasury Bills and Bonds the final obligations running into billions and billions until 2015 and beyond. As a result, the government at present is bankrupt both externally and internally. This has been the fault of not one regime, but both regimes with ‘collective responsibility’ to this pathetic situation.

(Author a retired Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Colombo, also served as Assistant Director of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce (1969), and a Director (academic) of the Colombo Stock Exchange (2010-2011).

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Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

13 mins ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)

Features

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

22 mins ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

22 mins ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins