Features

From colonial economy on track to a broken economy on tuk-tuk

Published

3 years ago

2023/01/15

by Rajan Philips

Last week I called Bangladesh burgeoning and Sri Lanka backsliding. Domestic demand has become the most important driver of Bangladesh’s rapid economic growth. Not that Bangladesh is not facing challenges, but it is in a better position to face them because of domestic demand. Sri Lanka does not have the advantage of size and domestic demand, but it is not the lack of size that has led to today’s broken economy. The hopes that President Wickremesinghe will fix the broken economy, at least will start its basic repairs, are also being broken with the government’s botching of the conduct of local government elections. So, now it is worse than backsliding.

The stunning Supreme Court ruling ordering a total compensation payment of Rs.311 million to the victims of 2019 Easter Sunday bombings should be sending shivers up and down the spines of decision makers in the echelons of power who have gotten accustomed to doing anything or nothing (never some good thing) and getting away with it. The Court has elevated individual responsibility by an astonishing 300 times over state responsibility. The State is ordered to pay Rs. One million for relying on the unreliables. Rs. 310 million will have to be coughed up by Maithripala Sirisena (Rs. 100M), Pujith Jayasundara (Rs 75M), Nilantha Jayawardene (Rs 75M), Hemasiri Fernando (Rs 50M) and Sisira Mendis (Rs. 10M). The Court ruling is in effect an order the government to stop making Nilantha Jayawardene the next IGP.

It remains to be seen if the long arm of the Court will reach Ranil Wickremesinghe when he is no longer President. For now, he is emptying his bag of political tricks to no effect and the IMF is keeping him waiting with no moneybags in sight. For others who made decisions in the Gotabaya Administration, whether on the economy or on security, it could be open season for litigations against them. If the Canadian government sanctions were to infect other governments as well, there will be no place to hide for those hounded by justice. Specific to our discussion involving LRT and tuk-tuk in Sri Lanka, what will be the fallout from the Supreme Court decision for those who made the decision to unilaterally terminate the Colombo LRT project that had been started based on a very favourable bilateral agreement with Japan for a very sensible project?

There is on record an Auditor General report dated 23 November 2022 (Special Audit Report on the Unilateral Termination of the Light Rail System by the Government of Sri Lanka). Will any action flow from it? We have to wait and see. It is now enough to say that the Special Audit Report is scathing in its censure of the government’s decision to unilaterally terminate “without formal, logical and justifiable grounds … a project proved to be environmentally, technically, economically and financially productive after incurring heavy costs on preliminary activities including feasibility studies conducted by foreign experts.” Be that as it may.

Colonial Economy on Track

“The Colonial Economy on Track” is the main title of Dr. Indrani Munasinghe’s pathbreaking historical study of the development of rail and road infrastructure in colonial Ceylon from 1800 to 1905. Roads came first; between 1800 and 1867 2,344 miles of road had been constructed, criss-crossing the island, with a concentrated radial network in the Central Province, the only mountainous region of the island. Rail construction came later beginning in 1858 with the Colombo-Kandy line. By 1905, Colombo was connected by rail to Kandy and Bandarawela upcountry, south to Galle and Matara, and north to Maho, Anuradhapura, Medawachchiya and Jaffna. The lines from Maho to Trincomalee and Batticaloa, and from Medawachchiya to Mannar would be added later.

Dr. Munasinghe calls the 100 year development of the road and rail network under colonial rule “remarkable achievements” for the plantation economy, but a “modest success story” for the large areas of the island left untouched by the new facilities. Yet, for Sri Lanka’s size and compactness, the colonial road and rail networks were relatively extensive compared to larger countries with more challenging geography. The location of the plantations also forced the new infrastructure to be concentrated in the challenging areas of the island.

Both roads and railways were owned by the government and the railways were run profitably to become a significant source of government revenue (29%) that enabled the expansion of social infrastructure in education, health and sanitary services. The tradition of colonial government (not quite public) ownership of transport infrastructure in Sri Lanka and other colonies is in contrast to the role played by private capital in the colonial centres in western countries.

The 19th century political economy of laissez-faire in Britain, Europe and the US facilitated the development of toll roads run by private trusts, and railways and urban transit operated by private companies. Of course, they depended on huge government subsidies, a feature that was not encouraged by governments in the colonies. Government interventions became necessary and increasingly extensive in the twentieth century to deal with the over-provision of rail lines by private investors, cutthroat competition between service providers, market failures, and the poor levels of service to the travelling public.

The 1930s depression experience and World War II imperatives also strengthened the role of government and the public sector in providing transport services in otherwise free market countries. In contrast, Sri Lanka and some of the other former colonies would seem to have moved in the opposite direction after independence. After inheriting a salutary colonial tradition of government ownership of public transport, Sri Lanka moved backward by privatizing its inheritances. That is a more recent development and there were other developments before we got to the point that has brought us to the pits now.

The Oldsmobile and the Omnibus

The two main transport developments in the early twentieth century were the arrival of motorized vehicles – cars and buses. The first to arrive, in 1902, was a two-seater steam car that ran on kerosene. The motorcycle followed in 1903, and two years later the first petrol car. Englishmen were of course the early importers and improvisers. Ceylonese were not late in joining the exclusive club and soon there were more auto-enthusiasts than auto-owners. E.L.F. de Zoysa of Moratuwa is credited with being the first Sri Lankan to own and drive a car – a black and blue one cylinder Oldsmobile imported from the US. A General Motors brand, Oldsmobile started production in 1897 and within ten years there were buyers in Sri Lanka.

The arrival of the private car on public roads marked the beginning of the private use of public infrastructure with practically little or no direct user-pay. The car was soon joined by private buses used for public transport. The first bus was imported in 1907 and bus services were provided by private owners. There were no regulations and the travelling public who depended on the bus had to survive the chaos of competing bus companies. Government regulations started in 1940 and 18 years later and 10 years after independence came the nationalization of bus transport, on January 1, 1958.

What is commonly known is the politics of nationalization. That the first non-UNP Prime Minister, SWRD Bandaranaike, nationalized the bus industry that had become a bulwark of the UNP. What is not generally known is that there were government commissioned studies (the 1948 Ratnam Survey, the 1954 Sansoni Survey, and the 1956 Jayaratna Perera Survey), all of which had recommended the nationalization of the private bus companies. The 1958 nationalization was certainly a political act but it was also predicated on sound policy. Nationalized bus transport was brought under a single institution, the Ceylon/Sri Lanka Transport Board, and the new system for all its shortcomings provided mobility to those who needed it most and who had no alternative mode of travel. Over time, it proved to be viable and improvable.

Significant improvements were made between 1970 and 1977 under the leadership of Anil Moonesinghe, which some have called the ‘golden age’ of public bus transport in Sri Lanka. Whether golden age or not, public bus transport had certainly come of age by 1977, and Sri Lanka was at a point where it could have focused its energies towards introducing bus-rapid-transit and rail-transit technologies for mass urban transport. There is no single modal solution for urban transport other than vigorously limiting the use of the private car in peak times and peak traffic conditions. And there is no private sector solution to public transport, although there are many areas in which the private sector can make efficient contributions but only as part of a public transport system.

The so called economic liberalization that began in 1977 was not without economic and political justifications. But some of the choices that were made were not motivated by good or bad economics but by corrupt politics. One of the worst choices was the privatization of bus transport beginning in 1979, along with the reckless neglect of rail transport. What was even worse was the manner of implementing bus privatization, later caricatured as ‘peoplization!’ It was an exercise that was bound to crash and its massive crash has been our national experience. World Bank officials were early cheerleaders of the Sri Lankan experiment, but were later forced by the experience to admonish that the bus story in Sri Lanka after 1979 was a model for not what to do, but what not to do in private/public transport. The bus blunder in Sri Lanka was and is unique among other Asian and South Asian countries. Burgeoning Bangladesh is its resounding proof.

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Features

US’ drastic aid cut to UN poses moral challenge to world

Published

7 hours ago

2026/01/1

Thilina Walpola

An UN humanitarian mission in the Gaza. [File: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency]

‘Adapt, shrink or die’ – thus runs the warning issued by the Trump administration to UN humanitarian agencies with brute insensitivity in the wake of its recent decision to drastically reduce to $2bn its humanitarian aid to the UN system. This is a substantial climb down from the $17bn the US usually provided to the UN for its humanitarian operations.

Considering that the US has hitherto been the UN’s biggest aid provider, it need hardly be said that the US decision would pose a daunting challenge to the UN’s humanitarian operations around the world. This would indeed mean that, among other things, people living in poverty and stifling material hardships, in particularly the Southern hemisphere, could dramatically increase. Coming on top of the US decision to bring to an end USAID operations, the poor of the world could be said to have been left to their devices as a consequence of these morally insensitive policy rethinks of the Trump administration.

Earlier, the UN had warned that it would be compelled to reduce its aid programs in the face of ‘the deepest funding cuts ever.’ In fact the UN is on record as requesting the world for $23bn for its 2026 aid operations.

If this UN appeal happens to go unheeded, the possibilities are that the UN would not be in a position to uphold the status it has hitherto held as the world’s foremost humanitarian aid provider. It would not be incorrect to state that a substantial part of the rationale for the UN’s existence could come in for questioning if its humanitarian identity is thus eroded.

Inherent in these developments is a challenge for those sections of the international community that wish to stand up and be counted as humanists and the ‘Conscience of the World.’ A responsibility is cast on them to not only keep the UN system going but to also ensure its increased efficiency as a humanitarian aid provider to particularly the poorest of the poor.

It is unfortunate that the US is increasingly opting for a position of international isolation. Such a policy position was adopted by it in the decades leading to World War Two and the consequences for the world as a result for this policy posture were most disquieting. For instance, it opened the door to the flourishing of dictatorial regimes in the West, such as that led by Adolph Hitler in Germany, which nearly paved the way for the subjugation of a good part of Europe by the Nazis.

If the US had not intervened militarily in the war on the side of the Allies, the West would have faced the distressing prospect of coming under the sway of the Nazis and as a result earned indefinite political and military repression. By entering World War Two the US helped to ward off these bleak outcomes and indeed helped the major democracies of Western Europe to hold their own and thrive against fascism and dictatorial rule.

Republican administrations in the US in particular have not proved the greatest defenders of democratic rule the world over, but by helping to keep the international power balance in favour of democracy and fundamental human rights they could keep under a tight leash fascism and linked anti-democratic forces even in contemporary times. Russia’s invasion and continued occupation of parts of Ukraine reminds us starkly that the democracy versus fascism battle is far from over.

Right now, the US needs to remain on the side of the rest of the West very firmly, lest fascism enjoys another unfettered lease of life through the absence of countervailing and substantial military and political power.

However, by reducing its financial support for the UN and backing away from sustaining its humanitarian programs the world over the US could be laying the ground work for an aggravation of poverty in the South in particular and its accompaniments, such as, political repression, runaway social discontent and anarchy.

What should not go unnoticed by the US is the fact that peace and social stability in the South and the flourishing of the same conditions in the global North are symbiotically linked, although not so apparent at first blush. For instance, if illegal migration from the South to the US is a major problem for the US today, it is because poor countries are not receiving development assistance from the UN system to the required degree. Such deprivation on the part of the South leads to aggravating social discontent in the latter and consequences such as illegal migratory movements from South to North.

Accordingly, it will be in the North’s best interests to ensure that the South is not deprived of sustained development assistance since the latter is an essential condition for social contentment and stable governance, which factors in turn would guard against the emergence of phenomena such as illegal migration.

Meanwhile, democratic sections of the rest of the world in particular need to consider it a matter of conscience to ensure the sustenance and flourishing of the UN system. To be sure, the UN system is considerably flawed but at present it could be called the most equitable and fair among international development organizations and the most far-flung one. Without it world poverty would have proved unmanageable along with the ills that come along with it.

Dehumanizing poverty is an indictment on humanity. It stands to reason that the world community should rally round the UN and ensure its survival lest the abomination which is poverty flourishes. In this undertaking the world needs to stand united. Ambiguities on this score could be self-defeating for the world community.

For example, all groupings of countries that could demonstrate economic muscle need to figure prominently in this initiative. One such grouping is BRICS. Inasmuch as the US and the West should shrug aside Realpolitik considerations in this enterprise, the same goes for organizations such as BRICS.

The arrival at the above international consensus would be greatly facilitated by stepped up dialogue among states on the continued importance of the UN system. Fresh efforts to speed-up UN reform would prove major catalysts in bringing about these positive changes as well. Also requiring to be shunned is the blind pursuit of narrow national interests.

Features

Egg white scene …

Published

7 hours ago

2026/01/1

Thilina Walpola

Hi! Great to be back after my Christmas break.

Thought of starting this week with egg white.

Yes, eggs are brimming with nutrients beneficial for your overall health and wellness, but did you know that eggs, especially the whites, are excellent for your complexion?

OK, if you have no idea about how to use egg whites for your face, read on.

Egg White, Lemon, Honey:

Separate the yolk from the egg white and add about a teaspoon of freshly squeezed lemon juice and about one and a half teaspoons of organic honey. Whisk all the ingredients together until they are mixed well.

Apply this mixture to your face and allow it to rest for about 15 minutes before cleansing your face with a gentle face wash.

Don’t forget to apply your favourite moisturiser, after using this face mask, to help seal in all the goodness.

Egg White, Avocado:

In a clean mixing bowl, start by mashing the avocado, until it turns into a soft, lump-free paste, and then add the whites of one egg, a teaspoon of yoghurt and mix everything together until it looks like a creamy paste.

Apply this mixture all over your face and neck area, and leave it on for about 20 to 30 minutes before washing it off with cold water and a gentle face wash.

Egg White, Cucumber, Yoghurt:

In a bowl, add one egg white, one teaspoon each of yoghurt, fresh cucumber juice and organic honey. Mix all the ingredients together until it forms a thick paste.

Apply this paste all over your face and neck area and leave it on for at least 20 minutes and then gently rinse off this face mask with lukewarm water and immediately follow it up with a gentle and nourishing moisturiser.

Egg White, Aloe Vera, Castor Oil:

To the egg white, add about a teaspoon each of aloe vera gel and castor oil and then mix all the ingredients together and apply it all over your face and neck area in a thin, even layer.

Leave it on for about 20 minutes and wash it off with a gentle face wash and some cold water. Follow it up with your favourite moisturiser.

Features

Confusion cropping up with Ne-Yo in the spotlight

Published

7 hours ago

2026/01/1

Thilina Walpola

Ne-Yo: His management should clarify the last-minute cancellation

Superlatives galore were used, especially on social media, to highlight R&B singer Ne-Yo’s trip to Sri Lanka: Global superstar Ne-Yo to perform live in Colombo this December; Ne-Yo concert puts Sri Lanka back on the global entertainment map; A global music sensation is coming to Sri Lanka … and there were lots more!

At an official press conference, held at a five-star venue, in Colombo, it was indicated that the gathering marked a defining moment for Sri Lanka’s entertainment industry as international R&B powerhouse and three-time Grammy Award winner Ne-Yo prepares to take the stage in Colombo this December.

What’s more, the occasion was graced by the presence of Sunil Kumara Gamage, Minister of Sports & Youth Affairs of Sri Lanka, and Professor Ruwan Ranasinghe, Deputy Minister of Tourism, alongside distinguished dignitaries, sponsors, and members of the media.

Shah Rukh Khan: Disappointed his fans in Sri Lanka

According to reports, the concert had received the official endorsement of the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau, recognising it as a flagship initiative in developing the country’s concert economy by attracting fans, and media, from all over South Asia.

Nick Carter: His concert, too, was cancelled due to “Unforeseen circumstances

However, I had that strange feeling that this concert would not become a reality, keeping in mind what happened to Nick Carter’s Colombo concert – cancelled at the very last moment.

Carter issued a video message announcing he had to return to the USA due to “unforeseen circumstances” and a “family emergency”.

Though “unforeseen circumstances” was the official reason provided by Carter and the local organisers, there was speculation that low ticket sales may also have been a factor in the cancellation.

Well, “Unforeseen Circumstances” has cropped up again!

In a brief statement, via social media, the organisers of the Ne-Yo concert said the decision was taken due to “unforeseen circumstances and factors beyond their control.”

Ne-Yo, too, subsequently made an announcement, citing “Unforeseen circumstances.”

The public has a right to know what these “unforeseen circumstances” are, and who is to be blamed – the organisers or Ne-Yo!

Ne-Yo’s management certainly need to come out with the truth.

However, those who are aware of some of the happenings in the setup here put it down to poor ticket sales, mentioning that the tickets for the concert, and a meet-and-greet event, were exorbitantly high, considering that Ne-Yo is not a current mega star.

We also had a cancellation coming our way from Shah Rukh Khan, who was scheduled to visit Sri Lanka for the City of Dreams resort launch, and then this was received: “Unfortunately due to unforeseen personal reasons beyond his control, Mr. Khan is no longer able to attend.”

Referring to this kind of mess up, a leading showbiz personality said that it will only make people reluctant to buy their tickets, online.

“Tickets will go mostly at the gate and it will be very bad for the industry,” he added.