By the time this column appears in print, the voters in the Eastern Province will be casting their votes at an election which many fear is not going to reflect the real will of the people. But the election campaign period has seen a lot of (cynical, some might say) development work being started. The Oluvil Port, the road network and other infrastructure improvement have begun. But history tells us that all this will end when the election is over. This has been the history over the past several decades. The under-developed areas like the East and Uva will remain under-developed until we have political leaders who are committed to development, to social and economic change and who think beyond their own little narrow political constituencies. The political leaders are smug in claiming that the growth rate is in excess of 6% and the unemployment figures are down. They prefer to ignore that the inflation rate has already reached record levels (almost 30%) and for the vast majority of our people the steep rise in the cost of living is disproportionate to the income they receive from whatever employment they have.

Over ten years ago, the World Bank produced a report different from what we have been used to reading from economic pundits and development gurus. In the 1990s, the World Bank realized that there were 2.8 billion poverty experts in the world. These were the world's poor. So the World Bank decided to make a study using 'open-ended participatory methods to engage more than 20,000 poor women and men from 23 countries to express their own perspectives and experiences of poverty, its causes and how it can be reduced.' The study published as 'Voices of the Poor' is in three volumes: 'Can Anyone Hear Us?'; 'Crying Out for Change' and 'From Many Lands'. The voices of the poor are loud and clear. But have they been heard? Apparently not, because very little has changed in the lives of the poor over the years. The perspectives they articulated then still remain valid and still remain to be addressed with seriousness by most Governments.

From the perspective of the poor, their low quality of life is much more than just material poverty. It has multiple inter-locking dimensions. Ten interlocking dimensions were identified:

These ten dimensions are present in varying degrees in Sri Lanka as well. Perhaps the order in which they are stated in the study is the order of their importance in Sri Lanka.

The struggle for livelihoods is perhaps what affects the poor most here. Both in the urban areas and in villages, there is uncertainty of employment and inadequate wages for whatever work that is available. The study also found – and this is true of Sri Lanka as well – that the poor are disadvantaged and endangered by the places and physical conditions where they live and work. We saw this recently when torrential rains and earth slips caused many of the poor to be uprooted from their homes and in some cases to lose their lives as well. We also know that many of the poor do not have the basic infrastructure and utility facilities readily available. The availability of water and electricity is totally inadequate and beyond the reach of most poor. Many have to walk long distances to fetch potable water.

In Sri Lanka, extreme poverty was avoided in the past by developmental efforts of the Governments from the State Council days to the first decade after independence. Good and affordable (mostly free) education and healthcare services, a well-run efficient public transport system and an efficient cooperative system that provided subsidized and rationed food helped look after the basic needs of the population. Irrigation schemes opened up new lands for agricultural production and reform of the tenurial system in respect of paddy cultivation provided security to the peasant farmer. But thereafter, the economic and social conditions of the poor have been going steadily downhill. The major part of the problem has been the unplanned introduction of the open market economy and the massive increase in corruption that followed. The leasing of valuable state land to private companies for large-scale agricultural production in the sixties was obviously inappropriate in our context and the experiment proved a failure. The World Bank study also noted that from the perspective of the poor, corruption, irrelevance and abusive behaviour often mar the formal institutions of the state.

In 1995, the Government initiated the Samurudhi programme. Animators were appointed to every grama sevaka division and they were to assist in poverty alleviation by promoting self-reliance among the poor. In the initial years, the programme was successfully implemented and it made a difference. But unfortunately over the years it has been politicized and the samurudhi animators are today being used as political agents of the government in power. It is reported that the samurudhi programme has been abused and the animators misused in the election that is now taking place in the East.

This has been the recurring theme in all such programmes initiated for poverty alleviation. Various development models to build self-reliance among the poor have been tried out. They have failed not because the models were flawed but because there was no real political will to make them succeed. Politicians preferred short-term personal gain to sustainable national development. A few years, when the JVP was part of the Government, a commendable scheme to restore tanks in every village was launched. A start was made successfully but, for various reasons, it was not carried through. If implemented fully, it would have had a significant impact in making our villages self-reliant and in generating income to the poor.

Development over Politics