(MENAFN- Colombo Gazette) By N Sathiya Moorthy
Between them, two UN affiliates, namely, the UNDP and the UNICEF have damned the nation on the socio-economic front. Much of it is unbelievably attributed or is attributable to last year's economic crisis, and tmay hide more than they may have revealed. Or, that is the collective impression gathered from news reports on the independent UNDP-UNICEF studies, but these effects are actually cumulative in nature, dating back to years and decades since Independence and even non-rectified parts of colonial inheritance.
The message however is clear. That the socio-economic claims and achievements of the nation through the post-Independence era, especially in terms of education and healthcare have collapsed almost completely. That is, even granting that all of it happened in a single year of economic crisis, last year, and none of it was a legacy issue since Independence, which all parties and leaders were in power.
Flowing from it all is a single point. The nation will have to begin from the bottom, almost from the scratch, to build/rebuild itself. That should be where to begin, whether it is a question of only rebuilding or is it actually building from the bottom up. It takes a lot of collective honesty and integrity on the political class and their bureaucratic aides – some sections, both Sinhalas and Tamils used to claim ownership for the nation's civil service, and that was also a part of the 'ethnic issue' when it all commenced.
They need to tell, rather confess to the nation, that they had failed the people, if not wantonly misled them, even if it was not outright cheating. Given the complexities involved and continuities required, over the next few years and decades, they need to draw up a national action plan together, even if they end up implementing them independent of one another – as the elected ruling party at a given time for a given term.
Vulnerable and more
The UNDP-led nation-wide citizens' survey (based of course on a sample) has found that more than half of the nation's population, or 55.7 per cent, is 'multi-dimensionally vulnerable', thanks to the economic crisis last year. In terms of numbers, the survey puts it at 12.34 million of the national population of 22.16 m. The study covered both 2022 and tfar in 2023, and 25,000 households, both urban and rural. The study involved three dimensions, education, health and disaster, living standards - and there were 12 indicators, including school attendance, physical health, unemployment and indebtedness.
Even more appalling is the UNICEF study that as high as 85 per cent of Grade 3 children in the country have not achieved minimum proficiency in literacy and numeracy – and in a way attributes it to the lowest two per cent budgetary allocation for education, the lowest in South Asia and much lower than the globally-recommended 4-6 per cent.
While Education Minister Susil Premajaynatha is committed to increasing the budgetary allocation – which anyway is not in his hands – the Education Ministry, along with UNICEF, has launched a national initiative to help 1.6-million primary school children who had faced frequent school closures over the past three-pyears, first to Covid, then to Aragalaya protests and of course the economic crisis, each one by itself, so to say.
The learning crisis has affected vulnerable children the most, including younger children in primary grades and those in plantation estates in the country, UNICEF has said.“The basics of literacy, numeracy, and social economic skills are the platform on which children build their own, their families, their communities, and their country's future,” UNICEF Representative for Sri Lanka Christian Skoog has been quoted as saying in this context.
Vulnerability is the key, identified even in the larger UNDP survey when it comes to the larger population, cutting across age-groups and education-levels or lack of it.“Several districts, including Ampara, Batticaloa, Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, Nuwara Eliya, Puttalam, and Vavuniya, exhibit notable multi-dimensional vulnerability values, with over 65 per cent of their populations identified as vulnerable,” the report said,
Relatively prosper
In particular, the UNDP survey showed that people living in the war-torn Tamil-majority North and the East, were among the worst-hit, so were the economically-marginalised Upcountry Tamils. Ironically, capital Colombo and the neighbouring Gampaha districts have emerged as regions with the highest concentration of vulnerable individuals. The UNDP study attributed it to the large-size of the populations in these districts in the relatively prosperWestern Province and region.
The larger population in the urban centres, in turn, may have owed also to internal migrations, in search of jobs, more often than not in times of rural crises, be it the ethnic war, past crises like the two 'JVP insurgencies', or continual droughts or floods, season after season, year after year. Such recurrence, for instance, is independent of last year's economic crisis, which of course, has accentuated rural depravation more than in urban centres, so to say – but the poor and vulnerable in the cities suffered equally the same way.
Likewise, the twin studies may have hidden, unintentionally, of course, the contributions of local socio-economic conditions to this persistent vulnerability and the inherent limitations that were imposed from the top to take corrective measures, even in the years before the economic crisis. Going beyond the obvious, namely, wars and famines, there was the social conditioning, where to acknowledge the truth, only the elite had the opportunities for university education and white-collar jobs.
This in turn metamorphosed the socio-economic outlook of the beneficiary classes and communities, whose children began getting better education than their parents and grandparents, then better jobs than the other – and the cycle should have continued, if left uninterrupted. The 'Standardisation' scheme that fixed higher marks for urban students, district-wise, for university admission, in the early seventies, did help, but it was not allowed to continue.
Affirmative Action
By misrepresenting the 'Affirmative Action' of the Sri Lankan State, as an aspect of 'ethnic issue', the Tamils of the North ensured that the scheme was killed by its sponsors. There was a hidden reason. Apart from students from the educationally-forward Jaffna district in the Tamil North, multi-ethnic students from capital Colombo district had to suffer even more. The Sinhala elite (upper caste Govigama) would have none of it, and they used the Tamil protests in the North (Jaffna Vellalars) to spike the scheme, which did help alter the face of education in deprived regions, including the Tamil East and the Sinhala South.
Ask those beneficiaries from the past few decades, and they would tell you, how they all had benefited from the opening of more universities, that too in their neighbourhoods. Before the 'education revolution', if it were so, caught on, even bright students from the East or the South or the Upcountry, for instance, would have to go to Colombo or Jaffna even for better school education, which alone would help them qualify for university admission.
The university admissions were not in the hands of the government, but of the teachers' unions, which used to stall all attempts at increasing student in-take, by swearing on quality, which was farcical at best and non-existent otherwise. Even today, there is no reason why more universities could not be opened, or more university seats, especially in professional courses could not be offered.
Alternatively, there are other modes of university education as existing in other Commonwealth countries, say for India, which are suited to local conditions. Under such a scheme, affiliated colleges, both private and government-owned could be attached, to individual universities, with a common curriculum, admission and examination mode, which could be overseen or run by a central authority, like the UGC, which anyway is already there.
Swinging, end to end
This time round, the Government seems to have acknowledged the UN agencies' initiatives compared to even a few months back. At the time, the Government had disagreed with the UNICEF findings on child health, especially malnutrition, again in the context of last year's economic crisis. This time, however, the Prime Minister's office has taken the ownership of the UNICEF study, through the 'Citra Social Innovation Lab'.
The assumption is that the PM's office has the blessings of the President's Office, in turn, and has also overseen the studies, which at times tend to over-state crises situations of the kind. The question now is how the Government intends addressing the twin crises on the socio-economic front, now that it claims that all major elements of the economic crises are beyond the nation and its people.
The reasons are not far to seek, as the causes and results would dictate the future course of socio-economic recovery. Whether it would be a GDP-driven economic recovery where the societal recovery is limited to a few rich getting richer while the poor become poorer, and the middle class finds i swinging from one end to the other, day on day, year on year, with no clarity about the future.
This is what market capitalism has done to the West, and did to the nation when it tried it out in the past. Given that a majority of the population, spread across the country (not sparing the so-called urban centres) is already branded as 'poor and vulnerable', visible attempts to pull them out of the rut, and more so their children in primary schools and above, alone should be the way forward.
The results of the State-sponsored disparities of the past alone contributed to the ethnic issue in the North and the East, and socio-economic upraising in the South, both of which culminating in the Aragalaya protests in one form or the other, more recently. The short-term message tfrom the two UN agencies is for President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who seems wanting to get elected in next year's election directly by the people. Alternatively, it is for the parties and forces set (up) against him.
The medium and long terms involve the nation as a whole and the population that is still at large.
(The writer is a policy analyst & political commentator, based in Chennai, India. Email: )