POPULATION-SRI LANKA: Street People Stand Up to be Counted in Census

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jul 20 2001 (IPS) - A beggar walks up to Punyasiri Manawaduge and asks him, “Sir, can you count me?”

After his initial surprise, the young law undergraduate gathers his wits and responds, “Of course and come, come let me get some details.”

Manawaduge is at the Town Hall in the heart of the Sri Lankan capital on census night, Jul. 17, with a group of 12 enumerators, dubbed “the outdoor team” collecting details of Colombo’s street people and the homeless.

The response to the survey has been surprising, because many expected reluctance, hesitance, indifference, apathy and most of all ignorance. None of this happened. Not a single beggar asked for money from the enumerators or census takers.

The response and demand to be counted in Sri Lanka’s first population census in 20 years was unanimous from the most ignored segment of society.

The population count was not easy in the north and the east. Census director Wimal Nanayakkara said the census was not held in some areas in the north including Jaffna, the northern capital, as enumerators were threatened by Tamil rebels.

Sri Lanka’s population is now estimated at 19.4 million people, but figures from this week’s census will be known by next week.

The rebels, fighting for a separate homeland in the north and the east, had vowed to disrupt the count, which was also opposed by other Tamil political parties on the grounds that thousands of Tamil residents have been uprooted from the northern peninsula since the anti-Tamil riots of July 1983.

“A census in this region, with fewer numbers that the original population, is certain to have an adverse impact on our community,” noted parliamentarian Mavai Senathirajah of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) last month.

Back in the capital, Manawaduge, one of thousands of university students recruited by the Census Department as enumerators, encounters Upul Pathmasiri and his family who live on the pavement next to the Seylan bank branch near the Dewatagaha mosque.

The Pathmasiri clan, wife and three small children, sleep next to a cart that he uses to sell fruits for his livelihood.

“When and where were you born? What is your religion? Are you married? What is your profession? Did you go to school and what was the last examination passed or up to what standard did you study?” are some of the questions posed to Pathmasiri.

The young census taker, helped by streetlights, turns the two- page sheet and proceeds to fill in the details from Pathmasiri’s responses.

Nearby, a policeman stops cars and other vehicles to enable two other members of the outdoor team — Colombo law undergraduates Priyanka Rajapakse and Thilanka Polgampola — to take details of drivers and occupants.

Some motorists wave a small white paper, indicating they have already been counted and are allowed to proceed. There is no compulsion, because the enumerators ask motorists whether they would like to be counted. There is no opposition.

Pathmasiri, wearing a neatly pressed shirt and shorts, does not look like a homeless person. He is contented with his surroundings and his lifestyle. “We have lived on the street for more than five years. I do not see any other lifestyle for me and my family.”

The fruit seller, who earns about 200 to 300 rupees (about 4 U.S. dollars ) a day, has one goal — to ensure his children get the education that he did not have.

His two older daughters, aged nine and five years old, are in school now. “I want them to study and be something in life,” he says, wiping away a tear.

While the 25-point questionnaire of the Census Department was filled by enumerators during visits to households in an earlier phase of the census, details of the homeless and street people were taken for the first time on Jul. 17.

U L Samson, a fruit-seller from Galle district who occasionally lives on the street near the Vihara Maha Devi park where most of his sales take place, says he sometimes sleeps on the pavement under the huge canopy of a Mara tree.

As Samson’s details are taken down by Manawaduge, others, among whom are many beggars, line up eagerly to speak to the census-taker. But before the young undergraduate can move to the next person in the line, a scooter-taxi driver pulls up. “Sir, sir, count me also please,” pleads a plump, middle-aged driver.

Nihal Shanta Perera has driven a scooter-taxi for the past 20 years. He says the white slip given by enumerators would help “to show his children that I have also been counted”.

Unshaven and dressed in rags, Mendis Karunaratne is a cripple who haunts the Town Hall area hoping to collect a few coins from passersby to buy a packet of rice.

Karunaratne willingly provides the information Manawaduge needs and even remembers his date of birth — like many other homeless people interviewed — contrary to the belief that beggars and the homeless are unlikely to remember such details.

Quite a few of the “Town Hall residents” are traders who go to their village during the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. Many are from working backgrounds like Karunaratne’s father, who was a respected ‘veda mahathaya’ (herbal medicines doctor) in a village near the southern town of Balapitiya.

Likewise, Mudiyansalage Wattegama is a pineapple seller whose father worked as a carpenter at the Colombo Port many years ago. The family came to the capital in the 1970s and Wattegama went to a small Colombo school but never completed his education.

After a couple of stints in the village markets and elsewhere, he settled down to selling fruits near the Town Hall. “No, I am not interested in going back to the village. I like it here. We are free and we are independent.”

Data on Colombo’s homeless should provide some fascinating details for non-governmental agencies involved in helping street workers and their families.

It should also reinforce a research study on the beggar population done many years ago by eminent Sri Lankan sociologist Nandasena Ratnapala, who lived on the streets for three months, disguised as a beggar.