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A totally different framework or the disastrous 'South Model'?

by Professor C. Suriyakumaran

(Extracts from a letter to LTTE leader Thiru Pirabhakaran)

This letter touches on the two development fundamentals for adoption from now (and for the Government too for itself, if it would!)

People - the key to development

These two 'fundamentals' may be titled (i) economic framework for development; and (ii) The organisation for development.

The economic framework for development

(i) Without being extensive on this, we do know of course that there are some basic facets to growth and transformation anywhere; and so, in the N.E.

One is the 'initial investment'; and the linked 'future investments' in each, in a continuing and enlarging stream that is 'development'.

Another is, given political goodwill, the relatively easily gestated supporting capital funds flowing from foreign loans, grants or soon thereafter, participatory investments. The last would home on its own preferred high profit, often its multinational, priorities.

These, along with available governmental resources, become the objects of development 'choices'.

What these 'choices' are is of course crucial for future overall 'balanced growth' of the country, or the 'area' concerned. Governments here, historically have chosen the big infrastructures or quasi-infrastructures, large irrigation, transport, tourism, housing and, of course, the vaunted, questionable, Middle East pools of female labour.

They have presumed that the former - that is infrastructural investments - being followed by hard economic returns will be the concern of subordinate initiatives, private or other.

(ii) But these unfortunately do not generate 'growth' in the needed sense of assured sustained growth. That is confirmed history, for us here! And so all our governments have gone repeatedly, without sense or apology, for their essential capital fundings into successive rounds of foreign borrowings of various types - their common denominator, 'economic' achievements! Where lie the 'holes'?

(iii) Two ingredients are integral in any growth - out of an investment, and so cumulatively, of the whole process of development.

(a) At the end of a production period of an initial capital funding, there should be sufficient generated internal resources that would, by then, fund succeeding productions and expansions.

(b) If not all, at the least, some minimal internal creation of technological capacities in units countrywide should emerge usually as separate ventures, in manufactures of their own machineries, tool and equipments (MTE), right down to 'farm' levels.

Without them, any future expectation can only be of more stagnation, indeed reversals. State policy, obviously still needed (not high sounding statements) on backup science, research and application - all of which have been natural elsewhere - especially at the initial stages, has been another vaunted empty scene with us here.

(iv) The alternative otherwise is, repetitively and sadly, a pretence at development, with renewed searches for those overseas fundings (with their debts); continued importations of MTE, often not the appropriate ones; and overall, a 'direction' of development influenced if not dictated by the overseas fundings and participatory investments.

This, essentially, has been our picture here, while we have pretended - governments the most - that all is now going well (if not yet well, then 'tomorrow'!) and keep touting foreign borrowing successes as victories!

(v) In practice, so far, the first, namely, our resource creation within each borrowing unit, while fair in private sector units, has - for no reasons connected with their being so - been dismal in public/governmental ventures. In the second, namely MTE creations, their record has been near zero, to say the least.

- What have been on show are 'glitzy - bitzy' electronic wonders, stock market wizardries in ongoing capital directions, with images of high-collared, bright tied, often mustachioed 'leaders of commerce and industry' from time to time in prominent media.

They are not faults of these players though, 'channelled' from the start, by intelligent State policy, numbers of these same people would have been leaders of the New Development that we should have had - and which others elsewhere in our part of the world have shown, could be had.

- It is not that commerce, money markets, tertiary sectors, have no place. It is that they just do not do so, without the first foundations and steps in self-reliant growth and sustenance. Towards all this, the entire overall skills education and training structures and scales in the country will need to be completely changed.

(vi) The N.E has the opportunity to initiate and to carry forward a powerful model of self-reliant growth; and for that, it were far better if it,

(a) probed and established - certainly with the Government collaborating (not leading) - its own model;

(b) created right now a framework plan of regional investments for development to which the initial resources that would be 'exogenous' (local or foreign) would be applied - triggering a wide development process across the board that would in the successive phases steadily become autonomous.

(The initial external funding flows on such a process should not be confused with other flows, presently those aid flows due in large numbers under relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction - the three 'R's of international usage - that are largely pre-conditional, in our situation, to development, and expectedly, not an indefinite process).

(vii) So much for the fundamentals for true economic growth.

Organisation for development

(i) I shall be brief on this second, still important, matter of the organisation for development. One the one side, we are visited with increasing international donor agencies roles in that development, with paraphernalia, overheads and others, which not only consume visible portions of the aid inflow, but touch wide ranging development programs of various type, and their planning and implementing - functions that are essentially the tasks of the country concerned.

In actual practice donor agencies direct roles are best in high visibility specifies, eg. a particular major industry unit to be set up, or a power, or hydro project and such like.

These are all at macro levels.

(ii) The parallel organisation for micro level development, the 'two legs' of any development, has not only to be outside the competence of donors, but also of very important categories now given prime place, viz. the so-called NGOO, (foreign or local), and the departments and agencies of government and all their paraphernalia.

Central to these should be the people, right down at the local areas, the 'CBOO' (the community based organisations) as they are now beginning to be seen, as distinct from NGOO, and even from others, whether-sub departments, or local bodies. The latter, vital as they are, are more central to extensions of services and utilities, indeed underpinning development, and also, for sure, enriching the fruits of development even though hardly performed to satisfaction by them so far.

(iii) Organisation for this micro level development, needs therefore still new decisions - both at governmental, and apparently at the N.E. regional level - on 'mechanism' for this development organisation.

It requires firstly, that the local people - community - in each local area, be the fulcrum for (a) needs identifications; (b) prioritisation, (c) participation at district/regional authorities levels in their development decisions; and (d) implementation.

(As first described in a CRDS Dambadeniya Micro Plan document some years ago, and succinctly spelt out by President Premadasa, development must be (a) people's participatory, (b) resources based and (c) production oriented).

(iv) A study just prior to this, had classified some eight types of 'planning for development' that we have had, at the apex of which stood 'desk planning' - from bureaucrats at their desks in the centre, or region, or district, with their 'remoteness', lack of reality and, mostly, lack of the three ingredients of true 'ground based development' earlier mentioned.

Micro level development needs to be based at, and built from each of the rural level community areas and people (the 'CBOO') in which - as a rare Finance Minister of a remote Pacific Island Country once said to me, the experts and their expertise, made available to the people, 'should be on tap, not on top!'

Call them Village Areas, Communes, Grama Sabhas/Sangams what you like - there they are, the only effective 'building blocks' (certainly to be assisted) for planning, programming and implementation.

Much assistance in these processes is called for, including indeed all suitable foreign personnel, the latter rather visualised as volunteers and participants or quasi volunteers than the elaborate paraphernalia of motorised, air-conditions, cost-loaded expertise that agencies so easily offer and governments so easily accept. The people can throw up, as one knows from practical awareness, dating back to the late forties, their area needs in their variety and with ground based sureness that none others can imitate.

(iv) (Purely as a personal recall, we may refer to the almost total neglect of our 'tanks' in the Vanni; and in the Jaffna peninsula.

In the former, while there were the two large, giant's and Iranaimadhu, tanks, the entire areas save the coastal zones was dotted with smaller tanks, place names ending in 'kulam' (tank) being profuse - today in neglect or even unknown. In Jaffna, it has been an almost forgotten tale. Little 'kulams' dotted every village, which every villager knew, and served to collect precious monsoon overflows, not only providing some waters to the areas, but greatly helping sustenance of the vital 'underground water lens' which was of Jaffna's very existence.

Traditionally, the village looked after them, which modern district led administration left stranded.

The in East, in particular Batticaloa, sharing an endless marine coastline and in the latter, expanses of lagoon waters surrounded by lush stretches of paddy and coconut, may look different. Yet at the human level, the villages everywhere still formed the management base of these structures, as also of their smaller cultivations of mixed county produce.

Epilogue

- Sir this letter requests that these be made the planks of the foreseeable, indispensable 'Development N.E' - initiating steps forthwith accordingly; and as I stated, indeed openly, urging closest governmental roles and partnership.

- As for the Government, if one may say so, please, let it not ask particularly at this stage to go in 'to help'. Having concurred in, even adopted the foregoing; let it play its indispensable role as Government - and there need be no doubt that this will then prove fruitful, to all around and to the country.

- Non-development - not development - has been our history. Right now, this may divide the country even more than an inadequate political settlement. Peoples, everywhere, have always grudgingly accepted the pretences and non-fulfilments of politicians, qua-politicians, in their roles as our governors and administrators, if their lives have been set on high and rising levels of social well-being and expectations.

- Issues of one country itself would rather be determined finally on the anvils of both economy and polity, than on either separately.

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