'UNP sees public service as a burden'

By Uditha Kumarasinghe

Public Administration and Home Affairs Minister W.D.J. Senewiratne told the Parliament yesterday that President Mahinda Rajapaksa believes if the country is to develop, the public sector should be strengthened to compete with the private sector and also to provide the best possible service to the public.

The Minister who participated in the committee stage debate on the votes of his Ministry said there is a huge difference between the policies adopted by UNP and the UPFA on the public sector. The UNP sees the public sector as a burden to the country and a waste of public funds. That is why they adopted a program to discourage and curtail the public sector.

That was clearly witnessed in the 'Regaining Sri Lanka' program introduced by former UNP Government. Their target was to systematically reduce the number of public servants to 300,000 or 400,000.

However, the UPFA Government has adopted a completely different approach on the public sector. At present the Government has increased the number of public servants up to 1.4 million. There is a public servant for every 17 of the population.

Canada has a 35 million population and they have only 262,902 public servants while the public servants in Australia is around 150,000.

Minister Senewiratne said said that initiatives were taken by the Government to make recruitment to the public sector on mass scale. Public Administration Ministry was entrusted the difficult of

recruiting 51,000 graduates to the public sector.

The Ministry has given permanent appointment letters to all of them at the Central Government and Provincial Councils. The Ministry would also recruit 4,699 Grama Niladaris into the public sector to strengthen the rural administrative sector.

He said that they Government has invested huge amount of money to develop the infrastructure of public institutions. A sum of Rs.3,046 million has been allocated to to refurbish 76 District Secretariats and construct new buildings in 2015. There are 543,552 pensioners in the country and their monthly pension costs the Government nearly Rs. 10 billion. Every month 2,500 new pensioners are added to this number.