Vital importance of strategy to use people

MANAGEMENT: The reason for economic failure in Sri Lanka has been the lack of vision and strategy in the past and the time has come to correct it.

Speaking at the annual sessions of Institute of Incorporate and Engineers in Colombo Managing Director Lanka Lubricants Limited, Kishu Gomes said the country's strategy has been to use the natural capital to live.

"We have not had a strategy to use the People - the only resource that grows against fast depletion of all other resources. The outcome of our decision to use capital to live rather than living on income generated out of capital has led to an undesirable economic imbalance and serious environmental implications."

"We as a country have struggled with inadequate capital and the attempts to inspire global investors to invest in Sri-Lanka has had mixed fortunes.

In terms of technology; one resource that can be strategically used to earn revenue has not been our strength. We have a number of examples within the Asia Pacific region where some countries copied other's technology to produce marketable products to earn foreign revenue while providing job opportunities to people."

Some other countries invested money on research and development to introduce cost effective technology solutions to the world thereby growing the economies. Sri Lanka boasts of some technology innovations in the past but has so far failed to realise commercial value.

Engineers are faced with humongous challenges globally with having to provide technology solutions to approximately 6 billion people and addition of over 80 million of people to the planet each year, the engineers will be asked to play a more serious and engaged leadership role in providing solutions to the ever increasing world population and its negative economic and social implications.

The Sri Lankan engineer is faced with relatively more challenges. Innovate commercially viable technology locally or adopt global technology to suit our conditions to minimize the repatriation of currency to buy technology from other countries.

Find local solutions to the energy crisis; improve infrastructure facilities at the lowest possible cost to make the investment climate conducive to the foreign investors, help minimize the waste of agricultural produce, control environmental pollution and to provide cost effective housing for 20 million people in the country.

Many countries within this region have used their people as the key strategy to win the world.

Arguably the best strategy a country can have is people. For Sri Lanka to achieve a satisfactory level of economic independence, we need to create an unprecedented 560,000 jobs for the unemployed and another over 500,000 jobs for the currently underemployed people in the workforce.

In addition, we need to create adequate job opportunities for the new job seekers who enter the market annually. The fact that foreign jobs generate substantial revenue for the country must be appreciated.

"However, the steps should be taken to send our people for 'quality jobs to increase the per capita income. Further, the expatriate worker penetration in the Sri-Lankan job market should be controlled to realise a net benefit."

Review of country's' economic data vis-a-vis resource availability concludes that the way forward for Sri Lanka is to grow the service sector to drive the economy.

Service sector is already the biggest and boasts of 59% contribution to the GDP and is the fastest growing. People drive Service industry. - (SS)