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| Sunday, 18 July 2004 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Mystery : After manifesto - what plan? by Wendell W. Solomons When we were children at the table, my grandfather would insist, "Eat your carrots. Horses have good eyesight because they eat carrots!"
Dieticians tell us about Vitamin A and eyesight. Indeed you can read much more about nutrients in dieticians' reports. * However, if no one went into the kitchen to cook carrots or beans, we children would have gone hungry. The government manifesto was out - but where's the plan? There's blame apportioned to the government today. However, a technically substantiated and truly effective plan had gone missing in the previous UNF Government just as in the PA Government before that. Take the example of the large white board erected in front of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce. It bears the caption "Unite to Establish Political Stability." Below that the board deploys sentences that suggest that the 1839-founded Chamber deflect blame away from the captains of business and industry. The board deflects blame to successive governments. Take the vicious circle; this is no striking workers' placard. Consider the number of alumni of the Chamber who have been VIPs in government including Cabinet ministers and Chairmen of statutory corporations. Yet, reason it out. How can a trade body apportion blame for a missing and practical plan of action to governments when think-tanks manned in the capital by doctorate-wielding luminaries have not evolved a plan, effective for any recent government? They too have disclaimers of responsibility such as "Nothing goes right in this country" (read: It is outside my sphere of responsibility.) Solution * Let us restate the issue of feeding the kids their carrots and beans. What about an effective plan to follow up on the manifesto? You are better off not asking an aid mission in Colombo. I chanced to ask a member of the economics section of a Western mission in Colombo and his training had not consisted of what economic history has demonstrated on the score. 1. Put "Abraham Lincoln" and "Henry Carey" and "industrial output" in the window of a Net search engine such as Google. You will discover what methods were used to uplift the agrarian settlers of the United States after it was devastated in the middle of the 19th Century by civil war. 2. Or you could go to the website 'geocities.com/worldcityesays/' to download the ebook there. 3. Or you could refer page 11 of the Sunday Observer of June 27. What Lincoln and Carey did was to focus attention on an industrial sector that would pull the country forward. Through that work, the wartorn country entered the 20th Century with an industrial output that was not second to Britain's. Practically, Sri Lanka only needs to focus on a particular type of industrial activity. The BBC report of Tuesday, July 13, 2004 indicated that with declining birthrates in Britain, many kinds of work could be outsourced to Sri Lanka. One of the firms stepping in to place the island in its outsourcing network is WNS. Established in 1996 by British Airways to outsource ticketing work, its success attracted the attention of a Warburg subsidiary, which is now the major holder of WNS stock. Future outsourcing includes activity such as accountancy and lab tests. Past outsourcing incepted the garment industry in Sri Lanka. Are there areas here for focus? Remember that car radio assembly was outsourced from the USA to a firm that is known worldwide today as Sony. Author invites response at [email protected] |
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