Letter To The Minister Of Health

Maithripala Sirisena - the Minister of Health

By Dhammika Herath -July 26, 2013 

 Dear Minister. As you know very well, Sri Lanka has been and still hailed as a middle income country with an impressive heath system which has produced remarkable achievements in our human development indicators.  Nonetheless, I wish to bring to your notice my personal experience in two government hospitals in Kurunegala to argue that our health system is now increasing failing and leaves much room for improvement. My father’s brother, now aged around 75, was admitted to Kurunegala Central and he remains paralyzed. For some strange reason which I do not understand, the relatives were asked by the hospital to stay near his bed and look after (I call it patient sitting). So, we in our extended family, took turns and did patient sitting day and night sitting on a plastic chair but we were not alone. There were many people doing the same. Dear Minister, isn’t there something fundamentally wrong here? Why does the hospital requires a relative or someone from the family to stay near the patient to look after him? Where are the Nurses, the attendants who are paid by public tax money? Why can’t they look after the patients? Where are all those people who are paid by tax money?

Of course it is our culture that we look after our relatives and friends who are sick. But we can do that at home. Can we, the working citizens, afford to stay away from our employments and spend days and nights in hospitals while we also pay taxes so that the government has appointed ATTENDENTS to do that job? What are they there for?    

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Urban Development: Where The World Bank Leads, Sri Lanka Follows

Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development Gotabaya Rajapaksa

By Collective for Economic Democratisation -

JuJuly 26, 2013 |

Contrary to the claims of the present regime, its urban development agenda is neither autonomous nor a product of indigenous thinking, rather it follows the well trodden though hazardous path carved out by powerful global financial interests and institutions. In this article, we look at two World Bank reports -Turning Sri Lanka’s Urban Vision into Policy and Action (2012) and Sri Lanka: Reshaping Economic Geography Connecting People to Prosperity (2010) -to underline how the interests of the state and a major global financial institution converge in ways that may limit the space for political engagement and alternative views regarding the unequal effects of the policies they advocate.

Misplaced stress on ‘freeing’ urban land and market instrumentsAccording to the Bank’s reports, policy measures must focus on removing restrictions on land markets and promoting financing of low-income housing, identifying and solidifying the economic functions associated with different regional centers across the country, and address inefficiencies in “overlapping functions” of government bureaucracy by streamlining local government, especially in Colombo. We question these prescriptions not only because they are not grounded in a sound analysis of economic and spatial inequalities in Sri Lanka but also because they promote a convergence of state and market interests in ways that are politically problematic.                                                              Read More