Archive for the ‘Features’

Effective government service delivery

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Image courtesy Washington Post There is little value in simply reiterating complaints about government service delivery since there is an over-supply of dissatisfaction.  Instead I seek to provide a set of conceptual tools that can be useful in understanding what government services are essential and why government over-extends itself in service delivery, doing too many things badly.  Hopefully, this will help us structure our thinking and expectations relating to government services. The incentives of politicians and bureaucrats are to always do more things, irrespective of need and efficiency.  As long as opinion leaders and the general public also continue to demand more and more kinds of services, there will be no check on the incentives that bureaucrats have to expand their budgets, as postulated by Niskanen, and by politicians to expand the range of resource they can extract resources from. I conclude with discussion of a concrete example of a government office that tried to improve services but is now…

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Google map on flood-affected areas in Sri Lanka – February 2011

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View Flood-affected regions in February 2011 – Sri Lanka in a larger map The map above identifies the main flood-affected regions, sites where relief and rescue operations have been conducted and specific DS divisions where IDP camps have been setup. Please click on the link below the map to view it on a larger screen. You may click on individual markers for detailed information and zoom in to view the location of specific shelter camps located in the east.  Please note that this map is continuously updated as soon as the Editors of Groundviews receive detailed information and reports from the ground. Between the 11th and the 18th of January, heavy rainfall led to severe floods and widespread destruction in several provinces across the island that affected over 1 million people. 43 people were killed and over 300,000 were displaced. The districts of Ampara, Trincomalee, Polonnaruwa, Batticaloa and Anuradhapura were severely affected in January and at present with heavy rainfall once again…

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Responding to a facile appeal: Galle Literary Festival and the freedom of expression

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Michelle de Kretser signing. Photo by Sharni Jayawardena, courtesy Galle Literary Festival The Editors of Groundviews received via email this morning intimation of an international appeal made by Reporters Without Borders and Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), a network of exiled Sri Lankan journalists. The Galle literary festival appeal notes inter alia, “We believe this is not the right time for prominent international writers like you to give legitimacy to the Sri Lankan government’s suppression of free speech by attending a conference that does not in any way push for greater freedom of expression inside that country.” Now in its fifth consecutive year, the Galle Literary Festival has been called many things, but a ‘conference’ it has not. Things go inexorably downhill from here. This ill-advised appeal reminds us of the equally ill-conceived Amnesty International human rights campaign during the last cricket world cup in 2007. At the time, even well-known human rights defenders in Sri Lanka wrote…

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Shyam Selvadurai: Literature, identity, politics and the Galle Literary Festival

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Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965. His book Funny Boy introduced gay fiction to mainstream English literature in Sri Lanka, and indeed as Shyam notes, in South Asia. Born to a Sinhalese mother and Tamil father, Shyam was 19 when he left Sri Lanka in 1983 for Canada. Funny Boy was as much about class and ethnicity as sexual identities, and though Shyam has repeatedly noted that it was not autobiographical, the fiction is set against a violent Sri Lanka. Shyam is presently the curator of the Galle Literary Festival. In an essay (Coming Out) penned for Time in 2003, Shyam brought out the vexed relationship he has with Sri Lanka. On the one hand is the love for the country, “…live and let live generosity and good humour that I love most about Sri Lanka” and on the other, the unsettling nature of it “in this country that I still considered my home, I could never be at home.” Yet…

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Some reflections on reading Dayan Jayatilleka and Dharmeratnam Sivaram (Taraki)

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[Editors note: A response to this article by Dr. Jayatilleka can be read here.] “If the LTTE were not here, we would all be fucked” – D. Sivaram1 The discourse on Sri Lankan ethnic crisis has always been distracted by sideshows of political antics from both sides of the ethnic divide.  The recent Oxford Union ‘fiasco’ is one among them. People use the narratives – The triumphalist Tamil diaspora, the defeated Mahinda Rajapaksa and the West’s conspiracy against Sri Lanka – appropriate for their ‘ideological’ positions; being confined to an intellectual and cognitive comfort zone is preferred than confronting the reality which is full of cacophony. Few years ago, we saw the drama about Maniraasakulam LTTE base in Trincomalee – Then UNF government, president Chandrika Kumaratunga, LTTE, SLMM, politicians, monks, NGOs and media, especially the Sunday Times – every section of the society took part in that orgy of filibustering. The Sunday Times almost declared war on Center for Policy…

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UPDATE: Google Map on Flood-affected areas in Sri Lanka

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View Flood-affected areas in Sri Lanka – January 2011 in a larger map The map above identifies the main flood-affected regions, sites where relief and rescue operations have been conducted, areas prone to landslides and specific locations that are at risk.  Please click on the link below the map to view it on a larger screen. You may click on individual markers for detailed information and zoom in to view the location of specific shelter camps located in the east. Please note that this map is updated as soon as the Editors of Groundviews receive detailed information and reports from the ground. After our last updated post on 12 January 2011, a Daily Mirror SMS update at 12:50PM reported that there were 21 deaths and over 1,000,000 people affected as a result of the floods and bad weather that continues to devastate these regions. The Eastern Province is the worst affected with over 860,000 flood victims according to the latest figures…

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Lanka’s Left, the State and the Present as History

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Photo credit: Vikalpa The notion of the present as history is of course borrowed from Paul Sweezy’s 1953 book by this title which adopts the standpoint of presenting the present as an ongoing process in which the past meets the possibilities pregnant in the future. The timing of an essay using this caption is inspired by the Seventy-fifth anniversary of the LSSP which fell on 18 December 2010. I will lead in to a discussion of the state with a few comments on the LSSP’s relationship to the first of five categories into which Sweezy, elsewhere, partitions the Communist Manifesto – historical materialism, classes and class struggle, the nature of capitalism, socialism, and the road to socialism (The Communist Manifesto after one hundred years; Monthly Review, August 1949).  The state is not mentioned here, it is a topic that Marx explored later in the context of the 1851 coup d’état of Napoleon III and the Paris Commune and lies embedded…

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Female deities of Theravada Buddhism: Kannagi and Pattini

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[Editors note: Once published, Groundviews does not change the heading of an article. On this post, the author concedes to a point made by Chandula Kumbukage that it would have served her intent better to have titled it 'Female Deities of Sinhala Buddhism'. The author's intent is further clarified here.] Female deities do not occupy major positions in the Theravada Buddhist pantheon. In Sri Lanka the goddess Pattini is an important exception. And, unlike most other deities revered by Sinhala Buddhists, her origins are particularly South Indian. Pattini is considered the goddess of fertility and health, a guardian of Buddhism and, indeed, protector of the island. The goddess descends from the wind and cloud and sky She looks at the sorrows of Sri Lanka with her divine eyes She takes the anklet and carries it on her shoulder Arrive O Pattini of wind and cloud and flower. From Pahan Pujava: Offering of Lights, from the Gammaduwa ritual texts Gananath Obeyesekere,…

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On Flooding and Disaster Management

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Photo courtesy www.facebook.com/battipeople Over the last two days, torrential rainstorms in the Central and Eastern province have caused severe flooding, landslides and an overwhelming humanitarian crisis with 758,000 people affected island-wide (according to the latest update at 7:14AM today from the Disaster Mangement Centre [via JNW]) 809 houses have been fully damaged and 2948 houses have been partially damaged. There have been nine deaths; nine injuries and four people are still missing (last update Sunday evening.) An article in the Daily Mirror details the extent of the crisis, According to the Centre (Disaster Management) some 55,936 families belonging to 14,519 families have been displaced and had been housed at 138 camps that have been opened.  Several Divisional Secretariat offices in the East were also reportedly under water while Badulla District Secretary Keerthi Disasnayake was also reportedly marooned as a result of a land slide which occurred along the Badulla-Mahinyangana Road. The following areas in the country have been affected by the…

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A slumbering LLRC: The image of reconciliation in Sri Lanka?

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The Editors of Groundviews were emailed the following story on a website called Athirvu.com. The photo is self-explanatory, and shows a commissioner of Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) falling asleep during the Commission’s recent sittings in Mannar. A reader of Groundviews provided a translation of the Tamil article, Have you ever seen a Commission like this? Yesterday, the LLRC travelled to Mannar. Women who had lost their husbands and children and the families of those who had disappeared gathered in large numbers at the venue to make representations to the LLRC. The people were in tears as they narrated their problems and concerns to the Commission. They made representations to the LLRC in the belief the Commission would address their concerns. But…Do you see what is happening… The person who should be recording the representations is asleep. Do you see he is sleeping as if he is exhausted after engaging in hard work? Will these people ever…

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Sethu Samudram: Bridging art, history and human relations

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“Sethu Samudram” is a three-year collaborative art project and a dialog-making platform between Theertha International Artists Collective, Colombo, Sri Lanka and 1Shanthi Road in Bangalore, India. “Sethu Samudram” is the name of the mythical bridge found in Ramayana, meaning the bridge across the ocean. This bridge connects Sri Lanka and India. There is substantial amount of good reasons to believe the existence of a real “Sethu Samudram”– a bridge across the ocean – between the two geographies in the ancient times, not only conceptually but also physically. This naturally-formed ancient bridge in the Palk Strait has acquired numerous mythical dimensions through millennia. South India is only 22 miles across the Palk Strait from North of Sri Lanka. Considering the proximity of South India to Sri Lanka, even without much hard arguments, the possibility of cultural exchanges and human migration between these two geographical zones for millennia can be an obvious presumption. Now a construction of a real human-made bridge is scheduled…

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Two years hence, the murder of an Editor

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Image courtesy Canadian Committee for Press Freedom Two years ago in Ratmalana – the suburb of Colombo I grew up in – Lasantha Wickremetunge was murdered in broad daylight. Every weekend, as I pass the spot he was killed on the way to see my parents, I wonder how many others remember him today, the significance of that place, his work, life or legacy. Photos taken from the memorial service held in the morning at Lasantha’s grave in Colombo. Courtesy Vikalpa Groundviews published a number of articles, including poems by award winning poets, condemning Lasantha’s murder and celebrating his life. In Memoriam: Lasantha Wickremetunge, Editor in Chief, Sunday Leader is a collection of this writing, and the debates they generated that are still, tragically, resonant today. Following Lasantha’s murder, our website transformed to black for a week, as a mark of protest and defiance. In March 2009, we reproduced in full a letter from Sonali Samarasinghe, herself a senior journalist…

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Political Opposition in a Nihilistic Sinhala Society

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[Editors note: The intense and interesting debate this article generated resulted in a longer response by the author. Read it here - Political Opposition in a Nihilistic Sinhala Society: Responses and clarifications.] Taking off from the present This new year loaded my “In box” with that ritualistic “New Year” wish which said, the year would be “wonderful-happy-prosperous-peaceful and even healthy”. Just one meanwhile opted out to say, this traditionally accepted “wish” had been so for decades and virtually forgets poverty, discrimination and injustice and instead wished “strength to treat all humans as equals with justice”. Unfortunately, both the commonplace wish and its antipathy means little or nothing, in this present day Sri Lanka. This Sinhala society as a collective entity has no such will, though individuals may show a dislike to what’s around them. Its the societal mindset that matters. Governments reflect that and so are their budgets and plans. Budget for this year (2011) is no good proof. It…

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Top 20 posts on Sri Lanka over 2010

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Featuring satire, poetry, photography and video to critical commentary and analysis, Groundviews covered major political events and processes in Sri Lanka over 2010. The site’s comprehensive coverage of the first commemoration of the end of war in Sri Lanka resulted in the publication of a seminal book that has been critically acclaimed by academia. Coverage of the 18th Amendment to the constitution was sui generis – content featured on Groundviews was completely absent from the Sinhala mainstream media, and only briefly touched upon in most English mainstream media. Only Groundviews looked at the real cost and symbolic violence of celebrations welcoming the President’s second term in office. This site exclusively featured accurate accounts of testimony to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) by key witnesses, including those given by renowned diplomat Jayantha Dhanapala and former Secretary of Defence, Austin Fernando. Furthermore, particularly disturbing testimony to the LLRC, first published in the Tamil language print media, was translated to English and republished for a wider appreciation and greater…

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Interview with Asoka Handagama

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Asoka Handagama is one of Sri Lanka’s best known and most controversial filmmakers. His films divide audiences and the critics – you either love them and celebrate his genius, or you hate them and decry his take on incendiary social and political issues. We began the interview with Asoka explaining how he approaches the creation of a film – what drives him to do what he does. He also speaks about the freedom filmmakers once had to express themselves in comparison to later years, when films were banned and Asoka himself was subject to a great degree of public vilification. I asked him whether after Aksharaya (Letter of Fire) and its violent reception, he thought of giving up filmmaking. Later on, I also point to what Asoka said about filmmaking going back by decades if Aksharaya was blocked, noting that despite its ban, Sri Lankan filmmaking both during the final years of war and after it, displayed no visible signs…

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About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

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