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The Oldest English Newspaper in South Asia
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Poverty alleviation

Last week's revision of the Samurdhi Programme draws attention to one of the bigger expenditure allocations in our State Budget.

A poverty alleviation programme as such was necessitated by the rise of poverty due to the fundamental shift of the country's economic system in the late 1970s towards a free market economic policy and an export-oriented industrialisation strategy. The removal of price controls and state subsidies on staple foods and, the consequent rise of prices in essential foods and other human necessities saw a new phenomenon of severe income disparities and outright impoverishment, including serious human problems such as malnutrition on a mass scale.

It was this socio-economic repercussion of the 'open market' economy that has necessitated the introduction of a poverty alleviation programme to function as a 'safety net'. By means of regular State financial hand-outs, it will ostensibly keep those millions of low-income earners out of the physical and social depredations of extreme pauperisation.

The grip of global free market capitalism, however, is cruelly dispassionate, and even state-funded poverty alleviation programmes are under the constant threat of 'rationalisation' - that is, of pruning in accordance with the larger requirement of the State's financial viability and national fiscal efficiency.

Even if the Government can, today, raise the level of Samurdhi grants, in the long run it is under pressure from the international sponsors of our national economic model - the World Bank and IMF - to restrain such expenditures. After all, under this economic model, prosperity or even survival for the poor can only come as a fall-out of the affluence of the rich.

Unlike the political leadership that imposed this harsh economic regime on our society, the current Government is more sensitive to the social dimension as well as the economic. It must make every effort to rationalise the economy not merely in terms of profit and market advantage, but also in terms of the human benefit.

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