Professor Mohan Munasinghe, Chairman Presidential Committee on Sustainable Sri Lanka 2030 Vision, called on lawmakers to implement the recommendations of the committee. Munasinghe delivered a lecture at the Sinhalese Sports Club on Monday organized by the Cambridge Alumni Association. The report has been made available online. The report notes; ‘the ‘for-hire’ industry is unregulated and has increased on the back of deteriorating transport and unemployment among school leavers with as many as 700,000, mostly three-wheelers, in operation.
Economic progress is further hindered when transport does not provide unhindered access for all.
Historically demand for passenger mobility has grown by around 4 percent every year. Freight transport has grown by around 3 percent. This is likely to be the case for a five percent growth rate of the economy.
Passenger transport by passenger kilometers has been dominated by bus transport (45 percent), private and for-hire transport (42 percent), non-motorized transport (10 percent), and railways (3 percent). There is 20-30 percent oversupply of vehicles coupled with poor margins due to poor productivity.
The railway market share has stagnated overall due to lack of modernization, inadequate capacity and lack of competitiveness with road transport.
A symptom of the resulting pollution of water and soil is the epidemic faced in the North Central province of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Farmers in the Central province are known to use the greatest quantities of fertilizers to feed a soil that has good physical characteristics but is infertile chemically and biologically dead. The phasing out of the fertilizer subsidy and promotion of organic fertilizer as an alternative is an important policy.
Reform the Termination of Employment of Workmen Act (TEWA) of 1971, in which the current compensation formula for ‘non-disciplinary’ termination of employment is the third highest in the world (Employers’ Federation of Ceylon, 2009). Such legislation severely impedes the competitiveness of the labor market. Labour is the most flexible factor of production, given that other factors such as land and capital are fixed.
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