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3. 

   More than anything else, this post highlights a rather interesting issue for me: the intricacies of profanity and its cultural implications. A keen observer can go on and do a thesis on the subject.

   I bet there’s not going to be a single Sri Lankan girl commenting on this post solely because of:

   …Ado thogey valla ahakata ganing pakaya?

   Those who comment just because I said that don’t count.

   Compare that to their response in your other posts where “fuck” and other related words came aplenty, and you’ll understand. Filth in Sinhala sound much more vulgar, and has a greater impact than any English phrase.

4. 

   That’s something Shanaka taught me. Have yet to use it cause I don’t want to get punched in the face. Sri Lankan girls are less squemish than you might think.

5. 

   Prabhath is right. Sri Lankan girls (even ones who use a LOT of English profanity) get really queasy around Sinhala filth. You should just see them squirm and go Cheeya at the Royal Thomian. And that over a few well known limericks. Btw this satire is kinda cool. Very Onionish. Perhaps we need Sri Lanka’s finest news source. Now there’s an idea for a kottu subdomain. ;-)

   Either way, all the best to you and Morq. I’m glad I stepped out of this some time ago. I totally disagree with your viewpoint, and so it was becoming difficult. I was spending too much time typing posts. Anyway, as I said, hope you and Morq hit it off more and more. Flames seem to keep this community alive.

6. 

   Part of the deal with profanity in the vernacular is it’s novelty. Anyone who watches English movies hears a lot of profanity, similarly anyone who listens to the lyrics of most rappers is pretty much innured to it. I got pulled up recently by someone for swearing when I (*ahem*) used the name of the Lord in vain. That response was so out of left field that I had to stop and think…

   The cultural norms in the media make the use of fuck and other words seem rather trivial. UK terrestrial TV (ok, rather late night TV) screened Me, Myself and Irene where the three “kids” rapid fire mofo lines like they were on a helicopter gunship. Who cared ? I certainly didn’t. More people use “fuck”, therefore there is probably a subconscious filtering . But throw in a slightly novel cuss word in your conversation and then people start to wince.

   Incidentally, not to fan the flames (ok, who am I kidding), but does Chanuka have a free pass from you (Indi) on offtopic discussion ? I’ve noticed his personal attacks and overly broad generalizations go uncommented and unnoticed.

7. 

   indi, so you’re staying in this because you want to find effective ways to beat an arugment like morq’s?

   that’s all very nice. but isn’t how futile it is a little frustrating to someone as passionately concerned about it as you are? oh and my two cents and i are quite happy to be detached and sit on the side lines and bitch about how useless this is. :) so this has very little to do with me.

   that is NOT true that girls get squemish when boys use sinhala profanity. mahangu, you cant just make such a GENERAL statament. maybe SOME girls you know are like that, but not GIRLS in general.

8. 

   Thimal, I think you are mistaken. If you mean my remark about the alcohol, let me say that is fully within topic. We talk economics here – not just limited to education – so my analogy is fully valid. One can argue all alcohols are same. C2H5OH. But rich drink one variety. Poor drink another. So if we were to go on by the lines those who always argue for oppressed poor the country has to focus on the varieties the poor drink, whatever happens to the rich! After all, we have to protect the already oppressed poor. We cannot let them suffer. Can we?

   I don’t know whether you have heard that 60% – 70% of the alcoholic drinks sold in this country belong to the category of illicit drinks. In other words, those who consume the same don’t pay a single cent as tax. One might say it is justifiable, because they are consumed by poor – who don’t have money to pay tax. On the other hand, this means the country loses one third of tax earnings because of this. So even if it is same C2H5OH – from the angle of Chemistry – it has a huge difference from the angle of the economics. And the bottom line is: In case of alcohol also the same welfare model (‘pin’ model) continues. Those who consume Beer, Whiskey and Arrack (‘the rich’ – if you can call so) pay a heavy tax while the ‘poor’ who drink the local variety pay no tax at all! In other words, even there, a cross subsidy works. (In the same manner it happens in the fields of educations, health, utilities etc)

   So if we were to entertain poor only we should promote the illicit liquor at any cost. If the volumes are increased the production costs can be brought down, and we can serve the poor C2H5OH – at the cost of millions and millions of Rupees lost in the tax revenue!

   So this comes down to my original question: How long can we sustain this model?

9. 

   thimal – i do give Chanuka leeway. He gets his share of shit without my intervention. Seriously, there are 3 steady people to call Chanuka on anything. Chanuka is also my friend, so I am biased. If you want balance here feel free to make it yourself.

   and I do agree with Electra, at least, I hope that girls aren’t that squemish. I actually got a girl to teach me some profanity but then I forgot and she wouldn’t tell me again.

10. 

    I wasn’t referring to your comments on alcohol, Chanuka. I hadn’t seen them when I made the comment above, in actual fact. The point I wished to highlight, using your name as an example in the process, was that dishing out ad hominem attacks weren’t really confined to Morquendi … or even to the whole leftist side in the debate. I do not agree with much Morquendi has to say, but the mud flew in both directions as far as I could see. I left a comment earlier that illustrated my point better.

    But on your analogy with alcohol, surely you are referring to a problem of enforcement rather than inequity ? You mentioned the word illicit there … In essence, illegal, or in this interpretation, perhaps unlicensed. You can pay less for the risk of going blind or dying from tainted moonshine, you can pay less for the risk of finding odd artifacts in your brew, you can pay less for not having the benefit of consumer protection (such as it is in SL, at any rate). In fact, there is nothing to stop the rich from drinking moonshine if they accept the risk and want to spend less money.

    Let me put it this way, if someone robbed a bank and then offered “but I am poor. I deserve this money” as a excuse for breaking the law, would you applaud ? I wouldn’t. That person broke the law. The issue of equity simply doesn’t need to enter the picture.

    To make a similar example, I remember reading that SL has a ludicrously small number of “millionaires” on paper, according to the Inland Revenue Service. Again from that article, it seemed that the bigger problem for the IRS was to collect all the taxes due. If tax revenues fall short of projections, is this an indication of a problem with taxes or a problem with the enforcement of tax collection ?*

    I am reasonably sure that you and I will differ in our opinions, but in my experience, a welfare system isn’t confined to countries which have lots of poor people. The UK taxes nearly 40% of income.. and higher education is free now and “top up” fees (which still amount to a third of the cost at most) are a hot election topic. Even the US, that bastion of free markets, has job seekers allowances and food stamp systems for the rednecks. Maybe it’s not sustainable, I don’t know.. but some welfare is better than none at all, in my opinion. I draw no conclusions, just sayin’… :)

    *I could be pulling this example out of my lint covered navel, but I remember it appearing in a local paper when I was in SL last .. so around November 2004. Beyond that, feel free to dispute the story. I care. Really.

11. 

    Thimal, I don’t know whether you have been following my comments. What I said was I have no issue about the welfare systems PROVIDED they are sustainable. (I have asked repeatedly, but nobody was able to prove the welfare system sustainable.)

    When Clement Atlee introduced Welfare system in Britain in the post world war ear, it was practically possible. Britain had enough money to sustain such a model. When C. W. W. Kannangara introduced ‘free education’ in Sri Lanka (in truth it was free English education -vernacular education was free since the beginning of the last century) the country had enough money to sustain that.

    The question today is WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO SUSTAIN SUCH A MODEL ANYMORE. As we all know Sri Lanka is a country trying hard to address the serious economic issues. The treasury is already empty. It will never be able to take our country forward if we were to continue with this welfare model. We need to grow up. Instead of waiting the WB to provide us with free lunch, we have to work hard for our lunch. Otherwise we will forever be the undeveloped third world economy.

    Education industry is one of the areas we can easily develop and there are so many opportunities in that area. Blindly opposing non-state owned university will only result in Sri Lanka missing that opportunity and probably the gainers will be the Indians. You have seen that happened in the area of healthcare. Sri Lanka was against private hospitals and we paid the price. Indians came up with Apollo and millions of Dollars of hardly earned foreign cash is now being diverted to India to buy healthcare facilities. Do you want the same to happen in the case of education?

    I know this will bring hardships to many. But no country in the world became a developed nation without paying the price. We too have no other option.

12. 

    I have one compelling reason why the welfare model will continue. My facts and figures from the factbook on SL, and yes, the humour of using the intelligence arm of the Americans as a source isn’t entirely lost on me. Call me a puppet of the evil oppressor if you will.

    The percentage of people living below the poverty line in SL, they say, is 22%. When one considers that the last election decided the current government by a margin of 8% of the vote, welfare is used as a political tool. We don’t have the money, I agree. We have serious economic issues, I agree completely. We don’t have the money to sustain full welfare benefits across the board. Perhaps we never did. But the fact of the matter is, no government is ever going to be elected by promising to scrap welfare. Sustainable, it is not. Rational, it is not. But that isn’t going to stop anyone from promising and spending on it. People expect The Man to help them out. Wishing it were different now isn’t going to change that, however much you or I would do so. No one can (in my opinion) argue successfully that welfare is sustainable. But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to stop.

    So what we need is to cut costs so that we can at least come closer to sustainable expenditure. What I completely disagree with is wielding that mighty cost cutting axe starting with education. or higher education, for that matter.

    Private universities ? We already have them. Well, we have degree awarding institutes already. Royal Institute, IIT, APIIT and any number of places with funny acronyms. The hotheads in campus can oppose them till they’re blue in the face, it isn’t going to matter. I certainly don’t see the point of opposing more entrants into an already free market. I do take your point about healthcare, but with one clarification, wasn’t Durdans Hospital around since the 60s ? I thought it was privately owned.. but I could be wrong.

    My point is this:
    We can’t stop welfare, however counter productive or unsustainable it may be. A government can’t get itself elected by a majority in SL today (or tomorrow) without making commitments to welfare. If you accept this, then you’ll see the point I’m trying to make. I’m no economist. I don’t even play at being one. But I feel strongly that totally cutting off state spending on education is like cutting off R & D at a company. Somewhere down the line, that’s going to come back and bite us in the ass.

    People picked India for an outsourcing target because they had a large pool of “highly skilled English speaking” workers. Oh, and they worked for pennies; but I digress. Would private universities alone have produced that sort of a workforce ? The 7 main IITs in India are state funded.

13. 

    while refusing to make any comments on the ongoing argument, i would like to thank indi for seeing the light about girls and profanity. sheesh. what kind of gender biased world do we live in anyway? :)

14. 

    What does ALCOHOL have to do with anything? :) Can we leave it out of this please. I tend to get very emotional when people say bad things about alcohol.

    And what is is this Kos Cutting that y’all are going on about? Man I love to cut up Kos. Fucking good feeling weilding a big knife :)

    And Chanuka, if you want to talk about why the Maha Bhandagaraya (gotta love that term) is empty why don’t you bitch a little bit about that motion in Parliament yesterday to allocate 5500 lakhs for Ministers to buy fancy vehicles. Imagine how many kids that would send through school :)

    (OKOKOK I know we’re done with the Education debate, but I couldn’t resist that one. Sorry. Won’t bring it up again. Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die)

15. 

    Morq: hahahahaha, but what is this sickle and hammer ‘cutting’ shit? I’m about to start an IP blacklist for Commies, watch yourself.

    Thimal: I think that’s a good point on the welfare state. Regardless of how long-term good refrom is, come election time people want instant gratification. Welfare crackheads. SLFP/JVP pulling 40,000 jobs out of their ass is one example. The absolute worst example is Mugabe’s Zimbabwe where they actually trade food for submission. What’s the most disgusting is that the more poor people there are the more crack you can sell, all while trashing your neighborhood.

    I think you do need to get over a poverty hump before you can do anything sustainable. Or get a right-wing Premadasa. One hope I see is America, where the Conservative movement made it popular to reject big government. There you got rural people who reject government programs out of a sense of independence, sometimes to their own detriment. I find it funny that in America – where the government is almost functional – it’s cool to hate it, but here – where the government is incompetent and corrupt – it is loved like a feudal lord. I do think that reforms can be sold as being in line with freedom, personal pride, and anti-authoritatianism. People I’ve talked to don’t want anyone to wipe their ass, they just want to rebuild their houses and get back to work. One of the most common sentiments in the surveys that Rotary/Neilsen and others did was “We are not beggars”. In America people vote their hearts even at the expense of their stomachs. Maybe not stomachs, but certainly health care and retirement. I hope that there’s the same pride here, and it could be harnessed. If you can sell reforms as freedom from a corrupt goverment it might work.

    Another thing I saw today was that Romania and Bulgaria are making serious reforms to join the European Union. I guess there isn’t anything equivalent to entice Sri Lanka into behaving like a reasonable country rather than a colonial brat.

    Electra: I’m not sure that I’m your poster boy for gender issues. There is a whole gamut of stuff men talk about with each other that they don’t say in front of women, and profanity is just the tip of the iceberg.

16. 

    Thimal, I do not have much time, so this will be brief.

    First about the stats: There are so many poverty lines for Sri Lanka. I know how they do at Stat Dept., so I depend on the internationally accepted one. According to that only 6% of the Sri Lanka population live below one Dollar per day. In other words, if we take the average number of members in a family to be 5, only 6% of the families have monthly incomes less than Rs. 15,000. This is much better than the case of our neighbours. Measured on the SAME SCALE, in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh more then 30% of the population live below one Dollar per day poverty line.

    So my theory on welfare: By all means give welfare facilities to this 6%. They badly need it. But there is no reason to offer free lunches for all, which we cannot justify for any reason.

    This is the problem of Sri Lanka. We think our population is poor, but in reality they are much better off than we think. (75% of the Sri Lankan households have electricity, 70% have television, and even among the poorest people 50% of the children go for tuition classes.) On the other hand, we think government is rich, but it isn’t.

    As for Morquendi’s question why I don’t question the colossal spending done to keep a bunch of idiots (who do nothing to the country) happy, well I do. But it is a complex issue and this is not the right place to get into that. By all means, let us discuss that separately.

17. 

    Umm.. that wasn’t my point at all, actually. Even if you take the lowest possible figure; 6% … assume we can correctly identify them. If a government says tomorrow that “henceforth, we will only give financial or other aid to the poorest x%”, everyone else who previously received help of some sort is going to feel shortchanged. They’re going to grumble about politicians spending on themselves or on issues which don’t concern them directly and they’re going to be ripe to be wooed by the opposing party. And that party is going to sweeten the pill for the disenchanted voters by promising … guess what … more jobs it can’t give, more aid it can’t afford. That’s how SL politics is. I can’t change this; and I’m certainly no politician to run for office so I was trying to argue against slashing education budgets because I felt it would be short sighted in the extreme.

    My point was that no government can stop welfare spending or reduce it drastically and not face a backlash. Not being able to afford it isn’t the issue. People being able to live without it isn’t the issue either. A goverment will be voted in or out depending on how it makes the promises. Therefore, welfare allocation will always be a divisive political issue. This isn’t true for just Sri Lankans. Remember the French truck drivers and farmers blockading roads ? Remember the German protests at labour law reform ? And you thought French and German voters were prosperous and shouldn’t complain, right ? :) So did I. But people will always complain if their current government tries to take things away from them… That’s a fact of life. I’m not saying it can’t be changed. But I am saying that it won’t change in the foreeseeable future, so I’m trying to deal with it. Such as it concerns me, anyway.

    By some standards, we’re well off. By sub saharan African standards, for instance, we’re practically millionaires. That doesn’t mean people aren’t going to expect help from the government. I’d also contend (and feel free to argue this point) that you don’t need to live below the poverty line to feel you need help. There is no magical tipping point that drives people to think “Ok. I have enough money. Now, I can do this on my own without help from the government or anyone else”. Well, there is such a tipping point, but as Indi noted, the voting majority aren’t over that hump yet.

18. 

    indi : didnt ask you to be a poster boy. but its just pissing off when guys think girls, and all girls in general, are ‘soft’ and too innocent to be in the presence of boys using some filth and dicussing apparently macho issues. im just a little weary of most boys thinking that girls are just big babies NOT to be corrupted by their MANLY talk. sure, there are lots of things girls talk about amongst just us girls, and the same goes for boys, but this assumption that GIRLS are sissies is annoying. its also probably true that some girls are uncomfortable around boys who use straight forward sinhala profanity, but you cant just draw up your own conclusions about how GIRLS are irksome about it. specially when you dont even know the entire female population. :)

19. 

    Thimal, BPO business in India is many tiered–you have marketeers making cold calls, providing IT support, desktop publishing, conducting research & financial analysis for Wall Street, doing R&D for Boieng developing flight-control software etc. The least skilled BPO worker earns about LKR 30,000 per month. By Indian standards that’s pretty good for a fresh college grad. That’s probably way higher than the average government worker in Sri Lanka makes or for that matter women working in the garment factories in SL. Wouldn’t you say?

    The higher end can earn as much as $80,000+ a month (based on campus hiring figures for IIM and IIT). These are no pennies by our purchasing power in our region. By rule of thumb, multiply what you make in SL by 4–that will give you a fare idea of your purchasing power in the US. And salaries in the BPO are growing at 15% annually!! That is phenomenal. Which is making employers really nervous because they think they will lose their cost-saving advantage. But as the latest Economist (Bangalore Paradox, April 21) argues, multinational are coming to India not only because it is more cost effective, but the QUALITY of work is also better compared to the US, EU. So nothing for India to worry about in the long run.

20. 

    Whether it is about Absolute Poverty or Relative Poverty, as long as there are haves and have-nots you are going to have disenchanted voters and political appeals to reduce that gap. This is not particular to SL, its the nature of democratic politics and part of it’s beauty.

    Anyway I’ve been looking at stats for SL on the web and all the documents/sites I came across show an absolute poverty rate of about 23% (please read on) and breaking it down by the great saviours there estimates are :

    IMF(using 95/96 data) = 25% Link
    WB(using 2002 data) ~= 23% Link
    “Evil” GoSL http://www.statistics.gov.lk ~= 22.7% Link

    Given that Chanuka uses the “$1 a day poverty line ” with a rate of 6% for his view of Absolute Poverty while every other institution thinks Sri Lanka has an Absolute Poverty rate of 23%, What’s going on? (keep reading)

    The closest and detailed explanation I could find is from the IMF

    
    …
    Absolute poverty is most commonly measured with respect to the ability of a household to afford a minimum set of consumption requirements…..

    On the basis of available data, we could conclude that chronic poverty affects around 25 percent of the population and that chronic and transitory poverty combined affects around 40 percent of the population…..

    In the past, poverty was viewed primarily as a problem of economic insufficiency, but its meaning has now been broadened to encompass material deprivation, human deprivation, including low achievements in education and health, vulnerability, oicelessness, powerlessness and exposure to risk. Thus, in attempting to solve the problem of poverty in its totality, we have to consider not only the economic dimension, but also the social, cultural and political dimensions…..

    Use of a higher poverty line implies a significantly higher level of poverty than does use of a lower poverty line. It is reasonable to assume that the majority of those living below the lower poverty line are victims of chronic (or long term) poverty, while those living in the income band between the lower and higher poverty lines are vulnerable to transitory (or short term) poverty. The 1995/96 DCS survey suggests that long term poverty affects around 25 percent of the population and that chronic and transitory poverty combined affects around 40 percent of the population, at any given time.

    …. If a dollar a day is used as the poverty line (adjusted for purchasing power parity), only around 7 percent of the Sri Lankan population was poor. But when the poverty line is increased to $2 a day, the poverty level increased to over 45 percent. The bulk of the rural population is engaged in such activities as small-scale agriculture and coastal fishing, which are greatly influenced by seasonal factors (rainfall, prices, pests and diseases). In a “normal” year this can provide a steady income stream whereas an “abnormal” year can produce disastrous results
    ….
    

    Allowing for changes in poverty for the period between the data accessible to Chanuka and the data used by the IMF, they both end up with an almost identical ( very very very close ) “1$ a day internationally agreed” poverty rate. Hmmm……Interesting.

    WB, IMF and GoSL all agree that the country has a head-count poverty rate of approx. 23% and by the same logic Chanuka agrees with them too? Interestingly the IMF reaches the same figures as presented by Chanuka and they use the data produced by the stats department.

    NOTE: Recently there have been news stories that claim the poverty rate may have risen to 26% after the tsunami.

21. 

    Electra, you seem to think that girls in GENERAL aren’t squeemish around Sinhhala profanity. Well next time you go to school, why not unfurl some good stuff in the vernacular and see how they like it? The MAJORITY won’t. This is is not about girls beign SOFT (note I said they’re FINE around English filth). The problem is that most of the girls I know (as in the girls in my social circles) are not that proficient with our mother tongue. They are NOT the type to sit at a they kade and listen to a trishaw driver call a waiter the vilest things on earth.

    On the other hand, most of the guys I know (again, the guys in my social circles) have been regularly hearing Sinhala filth from the ages of 12 or 13. If you go to a boys school in Sri Lanka, you are exposed to filth from an early age. It’s just fact. It’s not gender discrimination. I’m sure you’ve heard your fair share of our mother tongue’s finest. It doesn’t mean that all girls have. In my experience, most girls DO get squeemish around Sinhala filth. It’s the way the middle class social system runs in Colombo.

22. 

    Ivap, Let me not make the matters complicated. There are so many ways of calculating the poverty line. So naturally everyone end up with different figures. Again please note some of these figures are taken on individual basis and some of them are taken household basis. There are political (not economic or stat related) reasons for doing so.

    Why I select $1 per day figure because it is internationally accepted and can be used for comparison. The 22% or 23% or 26% CANNOT BE COMPARED with anything of any other country.

    GoSL does not stick to one figure. Different government organisations present different figures. Central Bank of Sri Lanka, for instance accepts 6% figure, in their annual report.

    Another reason why I don’t take the 22% figure seriously is that is goes against my common sense that 22% of Sri Lankans spend less than Rs. 860 PER MONTH. That is Rs. 29 per day. You don’t have to be a statistician to figure out that a person in our country cannot live for Rs. 29 a day! Even an unskilled labourer earns from Rs. 200 -300 per day. (That is the lowest paid job that comes to my mind right now.)

    There are several reasons why they end up with such an unbelievable figure. One, the poor sometimes purposely provide wrong income figures. (As some think they will not receive welfare benefits like ‘Samurdhi’ if they provide correct figures. In some surveys special methods are used to address this.) Then most of the rural folk do not actually ‘spend’ on many things. They may get vegetables from their own garden. Houses are built with the help of others – so they don’t actually pay for labour. Because of these reasons their virtual income don’t get recorded.

    The 22% percentage is further against common sense, because if the 22% of the people of this country live below Rs. 860 poverty line there cannot be 75% households with TVs. You try the Socio Economic survey 2004 report (A summary is available at http://www.centralbanklanka.org site) and you will find our so-called ‘poor’ are much better off than most of us think.

    I have lived in India and I know what ‘extreme poverty’ means. At any rate I can say our ‘poor’ are far ahead of the ‘poor’ in India – both economically and also socially. Personally I am happy about that.

23. 

    mahangu : i was only retaliating on the basis that YOU made an extremely general statement.

    “Sri Lankan girls (even ones who use a LOT of English profanity) get really queasy around Sinhala filth”

    uh huh. :) you’re probably right, most girls do probably get squemish around filth and a lot of things that are ‘native’ to us. and i suppose its only much ‘cooler’ to use englush profanity, like they do in the movies…and frankly i’m not too comfortable around girls like that. who can’t go to a relatively unclean toilet, who can’t eat chicken buriyani from ‘chills’ or whatever or havelock road, who think crowded buses are ‘yucky’. they just get on my nerves most of the time. but i’m telling you, most girls i know aren’t like that at all. so you sholdnt judge us on the few that you know (perhaps the LCites? not to be biased, but that’s believable somehow. and thats a fact too. not being discriminating. i adore most LCites i know) maybe it comes from having a brother, or having spent most of my formative years as well as my initial teenage years around guys including you lot…but i’m just used to it, its a part of life.

24. 

    The 22% percentage is further against common sense, because if the 22% of the people of this country live below Rs. 860 poverty line there cannot be 75% households with TVs.

    uh, what about the 30% of households without TVs, or the 25% without electricity? I don’t think a 23% poverty figure contradicts any of those figures. I don’t know where the Rs 860/month came from, 1$ per day means Rs 3,000 a month. I think you get the 23% figure when you raise the poverty level to people making 1-2$ a day

25. 

    To make things a little simpler, the workable definition of poverty is under $2 a day, reason being it captures both absolute poverty and subsistence – people living hand-to-mouth. I think it’s limiting to say things like ‘the issue is poverty, or political mismanagement or x,y,z’ . The width and depth of problems in SL is unfathomable and you can spend a lifetime figuring out what went wrong and the hereafter wondering how to fix it. Sorry for sounding like a prickly, mumbly academic, I’m really not.

    A more descriptive measure of poverty is average number of calories consumed per day. According to government stats there’s a narrow defnition of poverty; households that spend more than 50% of their total expenses on food(see the statistics.gov.lk). The minimum calorific intake for an adult is 2475 -2750 k/cal per day, using this definition 23.9% on average live in poverty.These are based international standards that have little to do with the situation in SL, but the census dept. came up with their own definition ( a little more mind boggling, I’ve tried to de-mystify)

    They go on to say that average per capita intake of calories in a poor household is 1778 (island average 2078k/cal). Of the 23.9% ( poor) 97% of them fall into the category of consuming less 1778k/cals. per day. Which gives you a fair idea of the poorest part of that group.

    By the by, the estate sector seems to be the most well-fed on average consuming 2550k/cal per day.Reading the stats themselves can drive you round the bend and I don’t suggest it, there’s many many ways to count the poor and the nagging questions is how poor are the really poor?

    To get a straight answer you have to factor in zillions of things some of them quite ridiculous like contraception statistics among poor people and that sort of thing. I’ve yet to come across a convincing stat for the depth of poverty in Sri Lanka and I think the statisticians are befuddled because like Chanuka says, the really poor aren’t that poor. Consider US$1.4 billion in private foreign transfers in 2003 – this is mainly the income of workers in the middle-east, received by the poorest 50% of households.

26. 

    Thanks Ru, this explains the lower and upper poverty lines. I’m using the statistics.gov.lk data ( the same doc that Ru seems to have read ) for the rest of this discussion as these are the latest figures and it’s also used by WB, IMF, etc and they adhere ( or at least try ) to agreed upon standard methodology.

    The point is, using the same data that produced the 23% rate when used to derive the $1 a day figure produces a poverty rate of 7% which is pretty must what Chanuka uses and is produced by the Central Bank. These figures are based on the income of Rs 1426 as at 2002 (it’s Rs 1526 for 2005). The Rs 860 seems to come from the 96-97 stats.

    Ru, correct me here but I thought that in determining the poverty figures statisticians factor in the private foriegn transfers and try to compensate for known imbalances even includig lies about income.

    Either way surely the WB, IMF, etc are not dummies in coming with a poverty rate of 23%. It’s their money after all. If we can’t accept these stats all we have is our views/preferences which pretty much means the political.

27. 

    Yeah, I’d imagine they’d count all income including overseas transfers. But I expect that lying about a daughter / wife abroad would be advantageous for people wanting to get on Samurdhi benefits. The means-testing in this country is ridiculous and corrupt and about as transparent as 10 inch walls.

    My next question is – why hasn’t the government tried to capture a part of the US $1.4 billion as savings-investment? In the last fiscal year the GoSL briefly woke up briefly from its stupor and offered low-interest housing loans to Sri Lanka workers in the Middle East as an incentive for them to invest, instead of buying consumer goods.

    My newest and most nagging stat of the day is: 35% of the workforce describe themselves as employed by agriculture, but this sector only generates 19% to the GDP (about 75% of that are export crops). Apologies to everyone who’s asleep by now, but my whole dissertation was around the agro-sector and it bothers me so much that such manpower generates such low-value to the country. For me personally, it’s like we’ve skipped past the little problem of feeding ourselves and tried to plunge headlong into services and industry and we’re not too hot at that either.

    By the by, is anyone else troubled by the fact that our working age is defined as anyone aged over 10?

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