DEVELOPMENT-SRI LANKA: Political Patronage Keeps Poor Out

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, May 12 1998 (IPS) - Sri Lanka’s social welfare programmes benefit nearly half of the island’s population, but there is growing evidence that its recipients are not just the poorest of the poor.

Even those who are “not so poor” live off pro-poor development initiatives, since government’s think only of keeping their vote bank happy, unconcerned about the steadily shrinking welfare budget.

As a result, Sri Lanka’s many social welfare programmes have had little impact in countering urban and rural poverty, for which independent experts say the lack of a comprehensive pro- poor poverty reduction policy is to be blamed.

“This has on occasions resulted in conflict of policies, inefficient resource allocation and even duplication of efforts,” the Colombo office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said in a note.

The UNDP and World Bank are jointly assisting the government by undertaking a full assessment of past and present welfare programmes, to evaluate the impact and usefulness of social welfare allocations.

Based on their findings, the Colombo government said it will identify the “real poor” in the country and ensure that future government poverty eradication programmes will benefit only them.

“There are various ways of measuring poverty like income levels or through the intake of calories per individual but one of the components of this study is to devise the best measurement of poverty so that poverty programmes reach properly targeted groups,” a UNDP official said.

Sri Lanka has made substantial gains in reducing poverty, since independence from British colonial rule in 1948 by investing in the social sector, which has paid rich dividends. This island nation is on par with some countries in the industrialised north in the UNDP’s human development index.

But poverty has remained a problem, and poverty alleviation schemes like former president Ranasinghe Premadasa’s much- publicised ‘Janasaviya’, have been successful only to a point.

Even the present government’s ‘Samurdhi’ programme is riddled with problems that have affected its working in some areas. The programme for the rural poor provides for direct monthly cash transfers, ranging from 100 rupees (1.5 dollars) for a single individual to 1,000 rupees for a family of five members, and for loans for poor villagers.

Until 1997, some 1.5 million households had been covered by the programme, exceeding the original target of 1.2 million, the Central Bank said in its annual report.

The scheme for rural development is implemented by 36,000 mobilisers (high school graduates hired for this purpose) who screen beneficiaries at the village level. Each mobiliser is paid 2,000 rupees per month.

But the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a report last year, said the Samurdhi programme was top heavy and needed to be improved, by cutting down on the number of mobilisers, hiring them on one-year contracts, and introducing a time limit for money transfers to beneficiaries.

While no proper study has been done on the impact of programmes designed to raise the living standards of the poor, the Colombo-based think-tank, Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) recently published a research paper on ‘Credit-based, participatory poverty alleviation strategies in Sri Lanka: what have we learned?’

Researchers concluded after evaluating past and present poverty reducing programmes, that the government was not able to implement “bottom-up poverty alleviation strategies”.

“Not only does it lack the necessary skills, there is a danger that such programmes become vehicles to distribute political patronage. Moreover, many government-led programmes revert to top-down approaches sooner or later,” it said.

It found that by relying solely on income-based criteria there was significant “mistargeting”. “In the first place, income is notoriously difficult to measure; in the second place, the tendency to underestimate income is very strong, particularly when the receipt of some material support is contingent on the size of the income.”

IPS said that the Samurdhi programme used a base line of 1,500 rupees per month to select its target group, but the preliminary findings of a study carried out by the University of Colombo revealed that roughly 20 percent of the households in the

sample were not eligible for the benefit.

The joint UNDP-World Bank study seeks to rectify such contradictions. But the fact that it will take 18 months for completion has raised eyebrows as Sri Lanka is due for fresh parliamentary elections in 2000. President Chandrika Kumaratunga will complete her six year term that year.

But officials here point out that the criticism is unfair since the study will be useful for all future poverty alleviation programmes, which ever party may be in power then.