Features

Sri Lanka’s economy in the first 10 years

Published

5 years ago

2022/02/12

By Uditha Devapriya

Assessments of Sri Lanka’s history often depict the period from 1947 to 1956 as an Eden before the Fall. Partly, this was owing to how independence had been secured. Freedom was seen as being granted, not won; unlike the multiclass bloc that had prevailed against British dominion in India, in Ceylon independence had amounted to a transition from the colonial bureaucracy to a comprador elite. Independence became a top-down affair, led by those who emphasised cooperation with rather than resistance to Britain.

Moreover, unlike in India, where ethnic tensions led to the partition of the country into Hindu and Muslim sections, in Sri Lanka similar tensions between the Sinhala and Tamil communities did not erupt until a decade later. Until they did, a belief sprang up that the country had secured independence without “dropping a shed of blood.”

Though these sentiments bolstered optimism over the direction the colonial bourgeoisie intended to take Ceylon, they also symbolised the bourgeoisie’s failure to consolidate a multi-class identity. Multiethnic though the composition of the leadership may have been, this was not reflected in the country’s population, which bifurcated between an English speaking elite and a Sinhala and Tamil speaking majority. The elite’s failure to address these concerns eventually led to previous calls for the replacement of English by two languages being replaced by calls to enthrone one, Sinhala.

Yet writers, politicians, even historians depict the first 10 years of Sri Lanka’s independent statehood as one of high prosperity. Two reasons are cited: the elite’s consolidation of a multiethnic identity, and favourable economic conditions which, had the UNP-allied elite continued in power, would have taken Sri Lanka ahead. I have addressed the first of these assumptions above. The second requires more scrutiny and examination.

Commentators who note that we could have done better contend that the colonial office handed over a highly developing country to local elites, and that the latter, particularly those elected after 1956, squandered the opportunity. Implicit in this assumption is the belief that the Ceylonese economy had fared well under British rule.

It goes without saying that this was far from the case. The claims of these commentators, that the country possessed the best road network, railway service, and harbour in Asia, in addition to being “second only to Japan in terms of per capita income”, under British rule, are hence suspect: “The fact of the matter,” Avocado Collective notes, “is that nobody has calculated with any degree of accuracy Sri Lanka’s per capita income in 1948.”

The UN’s, World Bank’s, and IMF’s estimates for Ceylon’s per capita figures in 1950 stood respectively at 311, 326, and 331. As the Avocado Collective writers correctly observe, these numbers could not have been different a mere two years earlier.

The situation was thus more complex, and less rosy, than what these commentators would have one believe. Sri Lanka’s first five years of independent statehood were dominated by problems of rampant poverty, widespread landlessness, inflationary pressures, trade and budget deficits, and declining terms of trade. These reflected the limits of an economy that had been catered to commodity extraction to the exclusion of industrial and productive activity. They eventually came to constrain the country’s potential.

Contrary to those who think otherwise, the country’s plantation sector did not do much to improve the situation. In 1950 the Indian economist B. Das Gupta pointed out that with a per capita monthly aggregate national income of Rs. 30, the development of tea and rubber sectors had “not necessarily meant general economic development of the country.” Simply put, the country remained “extremely underdeveloped.” To top these problems, “only some 10 percent of the population” earned monthly incomes in excess of Rs. 50, no better than the situation in the 1920s. That in turn had opened up a huge savings deficit.

Trade prospects were even worse. The balance of payments fell from a surplus of Rs. 314 million in 1945 to a deficit of Rs. 196 million two years later. The recession in the US had been partly to blame – US imports made up around 45 percent of the total in the country – but so too had Ceylon’s forever precarious terms of trade situation.

Sri Lanka’s terms of trade had risen from 103 to 138 between 1938 and 1947. By 1949 they had come down to 131. Fluctuations in commodity prices contributed to these declines: a decrease in rubber prices from 60 cents a pound in 1948 to 54 cents a pound a year later, for instance, contributed to decreases in the terms of trade of around five percent and in the balance of payments of more than Rs. 52 million.

Making matters worse, by independence the population had been locked into consumption patterns which favoured imports. One economist estimated the country’s propensity to consume in 1956 to have been 0.8493, with a constant of Rs. 20.03. Marginal propensity to import, on the other hand, stood at 0.2516, with a constant of 11.74.

Six years earlier, H. A. de S. Gunasekara had pointed out that three-fourths of total national expenditure was being spent on imports. Very little was diverted to gross capital formation: while the figure stood at seven percent in most developing countries, in Sri Lanka it stood at a paltry four percent, even in 1948. This meant that the country lacked investment capacity, without which growth could simply not be sustained.

Industrialisation was the only feasible and viable answer, and that obviously required heavy State intervention, as was happening in South-East Asia. But all three UNP regimes from 1947 to 1956 dismissed such an idea. The first Finance Minister, J. R. Jayewardene, had been entranced by Keynesian prescriptions, but his high regard for Keynes blinded him to the fact that aggregate demand policies were, as H. A. de S. Gunasekara noted in a critique of the government’s policies, relevant to industrialised countries suffering from excess capacity. In Sri Lanka, by contrast, the problem wasn’t an excess of capacity, but a lack of it.

To give the first two UNP regimes credit, though, they differed from the laissez-faire, non-interventionist position that Jayewardene’s successor, Oliver Goonetilleke, would adopt. Moreover, right until the withdrawal of food subsidies in 1953, which sparked the Hartal, the government continued the social welfare policies it had inherited at independence. The latter, in particular, became a sine qua non of democratic governance in Sri Lanka, a legacy of the Donoughmore reforms: thus, while expenditure on welfare had absorbed 16 percent in the 1920s, by 1947 it was absorbing a more impressive 56 percent.

Generous as these schemes would have been, however, the government’s economic plans were seen as less than stellar, in need of much improvement.

In a critique of the 1950 Budget, G. V. S. de Silva accused the UNP of transferring wealth to the rich even while expanding welfare measures. The government’s attitude to the question of local industry, which had by then become a priority across South-East Asia, also came for criticism: according to one observer, the tariff structure privileged the filling up of coffers “at the cost of irrational treatment for home industries.” The situation was such that while tariffs on areca nuts stood at 100 percent, those on brushes and rat traps did not exceed 50 percent, though the latter items could be manufactured locally.

Historians like K. M. de Silva dismiss the Opposition’s regard for industrialisation as a much-exaggerated panacea for all ills. Yet, it was industrialisation, led by the State in conjunction with private players, which had spurred growth in South-East Asia. Regrettably enough, Sri Lanka’s elites did not pursue such a strategy, even in the long term.

Instead the first three UNP governments prioritised full employment, which meant focusing on aggregate demand. On the one hand, they oversaw huge land resettlement schemes, which Tamil politicians alleged were a cover for mass Sinhalese colonisation. On the other hand, they embarked on large-scale projects like the Gal Oya scheme, which the Left lucidly critiqued: S. A. Wickramasinghe, for instance, described Gal Oya as a white elephant that benefitted American experts and local elites rather than the people.

The government’s focus on demand policies distracted it from other considerations. It also compelled it to promote if not entrench unproductive sectors, rather than urging reforms on them by way of taxation or nationalisation. Indeed, as H. A. de S. Gunasekara correctly observed, demand policies could not work in a context where land and labour were being channelled for such sectors, prime among them the estates. As S. B. D. de Silva noted in The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, for over a century these sectors had been driven by neither science nor technology, but rather by labour exploitation, profit repatriation, and absentee landlordism. This was hardly a productive combination.

Not surprisingly, the UNP endeavoured to appease these interests. Disregarding Marxist demands to nationalise estates, the government went about imposing higher taxes on them. Yet this hardly endeared the UNP to estate owners: Das Gupta noted that the latter began repatriating their assets soon after independence, fearful of the State “lessening their prospect of profit.” Later, Finance Minister J. R. Jayewardene realised, rather dismally, that planters did not necessarily prefer his solution of taxation to the Marxist alternative of outright nationalisation. They dreaded both options, and wanted out. In its own way, that was as much a tribute to the regime’s failures as to its economic ideology, which reflected the elite’s preference to cooperate with, rather than antagonise, British interests.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

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Features

‘Lord Edgware Dies’

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/11

Thilina Walpola

It has been some time since I read an Agatha Christie, the plot of which I cannot remember. So, I was delighted to find on the shelves of a friend Lord Edgware Dies, which I had a vague memory of, but no certainty about who had done it.

When I read it, I found that my memory of who was probably the killer was correct, but I could not be certain and the red herrings Christie threw in were so diverting that until almost the very end I wondered if I had been wrong.

The plot is very simple. Jane Wilkinson, who is married to Lord Edgware, tells him that she is desperate for a divorce since she is in love with a very proper Anglo-Catholic peer, Lord Melton, but Edgware refuses to divorce her. She asks Poirot to talk to him, which he does, and is surprised to find that Edgware has told Jane he is prepared to give her a divorce. This was, after he had categorically refused, through a letter, which Jane said she had not received.

That night Edgware is murdered, after Jane had been to see him, or so the butler said, and also Edgware’s secretary. But Jane had been that evening at a grand dinner many miles away, where a dozen fellow guests could swear to her presence.

There was a solution however to the mystery of two Jane Wilkinsons, namely a skilful impersonator called Carlotta Adams who, in the opening chapter had impersonated Jane Wilkinson, who had also been at the performance. But when Poirot goes to see her, he finds that she had been found dead on the morning after Edgware had been killed, of an overdose. And in her bag was a gold case, with a strange inscription, that contained the drug, along with a pair of pince-nez.

Her maid said she had written a letter to her sister in America and posted it the previous night. Poirot asks Inspector Japp to get the letter, and a transcript is received from America, and in it the name of Edgware’s nephew Ronald Marsh is mentioned; he had taken Carlotta to dinner after her performance, with which the book opens, and had then set her a challenge. Japp arrests Marsh, but Poirot is not happy and asks for the original of the letter, which the sister sends him. That shows that a page is missing, and the tear is obvious, though that raises the question as to why it had not simply been cut.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that Marsh had gone in a taxi to the Edgware house, along with Edgware’s daughter Geraldine, in the interval of an opera which had previously seemed to provide them with cast iron alibis. Geraldine had gone in to fetch her pearls so that Marsh could raise money he needed, and thus had an opportunity to kill Edgware, as did Marsh, for the driver said he had got out of the taxi while waiting and gone into the house.

Agatha Christie

Marsh explained why he had gone to the house on the night of the murder as having followed Bryan Martin, an American actor, who had been in love with Jane, whom he saw go into the house with a key. But there was no one visible when he entered, and Geraldine almost immediately came down and they left together. And Martin too has become an object of suspicion to Poirot, for he had been to see him before the murders were discovered with a story of being followed by a man with a gold tooth – a story Poirot immediately realized was false when he was asked how old the man was, and was told he was young, for young people did not have gold teeth.

A heap of French money Edgware had got for a trip to Paris was missing, but since Marsh had no need for it after his cousin’s offer of help, Poirot deduces that it must have been taken by the butler, who has disappeared. Christie has stressed that he is astonishingly handsome, unusual in a butler, and Poirot notes a resemblance to Martin, so he thinks the mysterious man going into the house must have been him.

Incidentally, later Poirot assumes that Edgware’s change of mind was because he was involved in some scandal, and I believe Christie intends us to see the cause of this in his handsome butler, though this is not specified.

Meanwhile, Poirot has asked Japp to find out the provenance of the case found in Carlotta’s handbag, and it turns out to have been made in Paris, specially commissioned, and collected by a woman with pince-nez.

But then another murder occurs—that of another guest at the grand dinner, which provided Jane with her alibi. The victim is an actor who had been bemused when Jane, at a lunch, thought the Judgment of Paris referred to the city. He told Hastings he wanted to see Poirot, but was killed before he could get to the appointment. Poirot had rushed there when told about his request, but it was too late.

Meanwhile, Poirot has tried out the pince-nez on Edgware’s secretary, but she could not see through these. It was only a chance remark heard outside the theatre that led him to try them out on Wilkinson’s maid Ellis, a spare pair that had been appropriated for the night of the murders.

Poirot then lays things out, having summoned Martin and told him that he probably suppressed Edgware’s letter, as he had been dropped by then and he did not want Jane to marry another. But after teasing Martin, Poirot says that Jane was in fact the murderer, and she got Carlotta to impersonate her at the dinner while she went to the house and killed her husband. After meeting Carlotta later and checking with her through a call that she had not been rumbled, Jane had gone ahead with the murder – she put veronal into her drink and the case with veronal into the handbag. She forgot to take out the pince-nez she had used earlier to imitate an American. Carlotta had registered as the American in a hotel and Jane had gone to see her, and there they exchanged identities. After seen the letter, she made use of it by tearing off the page that referred to her, and the S of She, so that the person who had challenged Carlotta to impersonate her seemed to be a man.

There is a coda in which Jane, condemned to death, writes to Hastings, still full of pride at her ingenuity hoping she will be remembered.

Features

Desilt reservoirs, learn from our ancient irrigation systems

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/11

Thilina Walpola

Polgolla

by Prof. O. A. Ileperuma

Silting of reservoirs is a major problem today affecting our hydropower production and irrigation systems. The main Mahaweli reservoirs are silted to a considerable extent reducing the water holding capacity of them. Due to poor soil management practices, floodwaters deposit large amounts of silt in these reservoirs. When the Polgolla reservoir was fully drained about two years back, one could see mountains of silt in the lower reaches of the reservoir. A rough estimate is that 50% of the total capacity of these reservoirs has been lost to siltation. This is a serious issue which affects not only power and agriculture but also flood control.

Our ancient irrigation systems ensured that desilting of reservoirs took place under royal decree where all users of the reservoirs were ordered to carry out desilting of reservoirs during the dry season. The clay thus collected was used in making bricks for the construction of great stupas which dot the landscape of our ancient kingdoms. This ensured that the reservoirs had their full capacity filled with water for the next cultivating season. Our ancient kings were clever enough not to construct reservoirs by blocking main rivers such as the Mahaweli. A classic example is the Minipe left canal where they tapped only the surface water of Mahaweli. Even the bigger tanks such as Nuwara Wewa and Parakrama Samudraya were fed with minor rivulets. There were also other ingenious features in the cascade irrigation systems built by the ancient kings, such as mud sluice canals and forest reservations between the reservoirs in the cascade system. These reservations helped trap silt and remove excess nutrients, which could otherwise contribute to increasing salinity as water flowed from one reservoir to another.

: Parakrama Samudraya

: Kalawewa

: Kotmale

Victoria

Moragahakanda

A classic engineering marvel is the former Yoda Ela, which carries water from Kalawewa to Nuwara Wewa and Tissa Wewa. It is 87 km long although the straight distance between these points is only about 40 km. The gradient of this canal is about 10 cm per km or 6 inches per mile. Yodha Ela functions as a moving reservoir and feeds about 4,600 hectares of paddy lands. It is a winding canal with about 120 smaller reservoirs on its way. It was constructed during the reign of King Dhatusena around 459 AD and later expanded by King Parakramabahu by connecting more reservoirs to the network. Unfortunately, during the Mahaweli project our modern-day engineers constructed a concrete canal replacing the winding path of this Yoda Ela also called Jaya Ganga. This effectively removed the ability of the old Yoda Ela to remove silt and nutrients. The bank of this Ela has wet zone trees such as jak and areca nut growing well. They take up the nutrients from the flowing stream making the water suitable for irrigation later.

Ancient Mesopotamian civilisations depended on dams constructed along the two main rivers, Euphrates and Tigris. After continuous irrigation of their fields over several thousand years, salinity of the irrigated lands increased making them unsuitable for agriculture. People died due to famine and this clearly illustrates the danger of blocking main rivers for agriculture. There is scientific evidence that the salinity of paddy soils in the Mahaweli C area is increasing.

We saw the devastation caused by Cyclone Ditwah. The sluice gates of the Kotmale Reservoir were opened, and Kandy and Peradeniya were flooded. If the reservoir had had greater storage capacity, couldn’t the opening of the gates have been delayed? This may not be an argument that modern-day engineers would readily accept, and I am not an irrigation expert. These ideas may well be naïve. But most of us tend to think of reservoirs mainly in terms of hydropower generation and irrigation, while their role in flood control receives much less attention. The question therefore deserves serious consideration. Could restoring lost reservoir capacity through desilting help improve our ability to manage extreme rainfall and reduce flood risks?

Desilting our reservoirs should be considered a national priority.

Features

Losing out to Ethiopia

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/11

Thilina Walpola

From Trailblazer to Tailender

Export diversification – Missing the wood for the trees – Part III

by Gomi Senadhira

In Sri Lanka, the word “Ethiopia” is often used as disparaging slang to describe individuals or areas experiencing extreme poverty, starvation, or severe economic hardship. This linguistic habit originated in the 1980s with the Western media coverage of the devastating Ethiopian famine of 1983-85. That media coverage shocked the world but also left an outdated and offensive global stereotype that the country is permanently starving. Much has changed since then. By now, with an annual growth rate of around 9%, it is the fastest-growing economy in sub-Saharan Africa. Ethiopia has also emerged as a highly competitive exporter and is challenging not only its competitors in the region but also countries like Sri Lanka. This article is on how Sri Lanka has lost ground to Ethiopia (and a few other countries) in the GCC markets for agricultural and floricultural products.

Sri Lanka – A Pioneer in the Agriculture and Floricultural Market in the GCC

As discussed in Part II of this article, by the mid-1980s Sri Lanka had established a strong foothold in the GCC’s fruit, vegetable, and floricultural market. Geographical proximity and well-established shipping and air links gave Sri Lanka a strong comparative advantage over Southeast Asian and African nations. Thailand, Vietnam, and Kenya were not even in the market. At that time, Ethiopia was experiencing (as BBC news reports described) “a biblical famine”.

The market was not very large, but it was lucrative and growing. Trade Minister Lalith Athulathmudali as well as the Chairman of the Export Development Board, Victor Santiapillai, who visited Kuwait (and the GCC countries), recognised the market potential for these products and encouraged us to continue with our work. The minister was particularly keen to further develop links between the market for these products, exporters, and his Export Production Villages (EPVs). So, it was becoming a successful case not only for export diversification but also for transferring gains from exports directly to rural households.

From Trailblazer to Tailender

As a result, even by the beginning of this century Sri Lanka had a larger market share than most of its competitors from Asia or Africa. But since then, our competitiveness has weakened significantly. The tables below provide a comparative snapshot of Sri Lanka’s performance vis-à-vis Thailand, Vietnam, Kenya and Ethiopia in the GCC market for vegetables, fruits and floricultural products. As illustrated therein, in 2001 Sri Lanka was ahead of Thailand, Kenya and Ethiopia in this small but rapidly growing market. Since then, we have fallen behind Thailand, Kenya and many other countries in that lucrative market. If this trend continues, Sri Lanka will fall behind Ethiopia within the next few years. (See Table 1)

In the GCC market for vegetables (covered in HS chapter 07), Sri Lanka was ahead of most other competitors in 2001. As illustrated in Table 1 , Sri Lanka had failed to develop this market, while Thailand, Kenya, and even Ethiopia had very efficiently increased their market shares. The GCC is a market to which Sri Lanka can supply some vegetables, like cabbages, by sea. It appears Sri Lanka had also failed to exploit this mode of supply.

We can see a similar trend in the market for fruits. Vietnam, Kenya, and Thailand have emerged as major players, while exports from Sri Lanka have staggered on slowly. In this segment, Vietnam has emerged as a leading player during the last twenty years and the GCC imports from Viet Nam have shot up from US$44 thousand in 2001 to US$346 million by 2024. In part one of these articles, I discussed the remarkable increase of jackfruit exports from Vietnam “…just $3 million in 2015 to an impressive $236.8 million in 2023” while most of our jackfruit production rots under the trees. This explains how countries develop their markets, geographically and product-wise. (See Table 2)

Sri Lanka’s performance has been weakest in the market for floricultural products (HS Chapter 06), which groups live trees, cut flowers, and ornamental foliage. When we first entered the market in the 1980s, the market was dominated by the Netherlands, and Kenya and Ethiopia were not even in the market. At that time, we identified the Gulf states as a market where Sri Lanka could have a dominant presence due to geographical proximity. Even in 2001, Sri Lanka was ahead of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Thailand. But by now, Kenya has emerged as the dominant supplier. Ethiopia is also expanding its market share and is the third-largest exporter. (See Table 3)

Missing the Wood for the Trees

In the mid-1980s, Sri Lanka first established its foothold in the GCC market. Since then, Thailand, Vietnam, Kenya, and even Ethiopia have moved well ahead of us and have become leading players. Why did we lag behind in our export diversification efforts in general and, more particularly, in the GCC market?

The reasons are very clear. After the initial attempts in the 1980s and early 1990s, Sri Lanka has not been proactively involved in identifying, developing, and promoting new products and markets, or protecting and further developing new markets already established. The focus has simply been on traditional exports: tea, coconut, cinnamon, and garments, while other products were almost ignored. In essence, we have been and continue to focus intensely on a narrow group of products and markets, and we have lost sight of the bigger picture.

(The writer can be reached at senadhiragomi@gmail.com)