Top economist takes on university teachers :

FUTA’s demands ‘outrageous’

A leading economist and a senior lecturer at the Colombo University Dr. Lalithasiri Gunaruwan has dubbed the FUTA demands as ‘illogical, inappropriate and irrelevant’.

The FUTA’s week-long-strike is continuing’. In a letter to the Arts Faculty Teachers’ Association (AFTA) and Federation of University Teachers Association (FUTA) Dr. Gunaruwan said that the demand for a fixed 6 percent allocation of the GDP for the education sector is outrageous considering that the total Government Budget is just nearly one-quarter of the GDP by now. This was almost 40 percent of the GDP in the late 1970s.

Thus, a six percent ratio of the GDP applied today would mean nearly a quarter of the total Government expenditure (or over one-third of the total Government revenue) having to be allocated for education,” he said.

In an economy where almost all fast-growing sectors (industries, tourism, transport and many services) belong to the private sector, this trend will only continue and as a result the share of the Government Budget in the economy would reduce further.

Higher ratios from the GDP could be spent by the countries which have large public sectors. This is the case in Communist countries such as Cuba.

He said, “There is no disagreement on the importance of protecting and further developing the public education system and the necessity to prevent any pruning of funds in real terms made available to public education’, and added that the strikers had missed the focus as there were more pressing needs elsewhere in the education sector”.

He called upon the FUTA and AFTA to take note that the Government would have to withdraw from many other sectors such as power, railways, highways, ports, airports and irrigation, if a fixed percentage of the GDP as demanded by them is allocated paving the way for privatisation of these resource generating strategic activities. “It cannot be conceived that this simple arithmetic is not understood by eminent academics in different professions, particularly in engineering, mathematics and economics,” he said.