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Development challenges

Now that the war is over, the focus is on development. Numerous have been the calls by the President to all political parties and the citizenry to rally round to take up the challenge of development.

Sri Lanka has still a long way to reach the level of a developed state. Hence the development challenge has to be addressed urgently and in earnest. We wish to raise certain issues pertaining to our development challenges.

First of all we should understand what development is. Any confusion on the matter would result in the country drifting along aimless whatever plans and projects are implemented. In fact, the question was never raised in the immediate aftermath of independence. Then it was just carrying on the same colonial type of economy with a few Ceylonizations.

The comprador bourgeois and the landed gentry were happy enough serving the former colonial masters, allowing them to plunder our wealth and importing even the essentials from abroad. The policy of servility was seen not only in the sphere of economics and politics, culturally too it was subjugation to the culture of the colonial masters.

It was the upheaval of 1956 that ushered in an era of cultural renaissance and a far greater measure of independence that culminated in the Republican Constitution of 1972 when Sri Lanka became fully sovereign.

In the fundamental relations that defined the character of the economy and in turn its politics, it was still a case of dependent capitalism. The congenital defects in the system arising from the superimposition of capitalist relations on a semi-feudal society and the supplanting of emigrant labour on a plantation culture that heavily depended on pre-capitalist relations ensured the dominance of foreign capital.

However, the opening of the country to the then existing socialist world and the competition between the two systems made it possible for the country to start off on the building of a local industrial base and fortify the nascent national bourgeoisie.

This spring was however, short-lived. With the failure of the closed economic policies and the weakening of global socialism the path was laid open for the aggressively developing neo-liberal capitalism to embrace and engulf Sri Lanka completely turning turtle many a victory achieved by the people during years of struggle. The poor and marginalized were deprived of the safety nets that were secure earlier and a frenzied privatization process transferred the wealth from the poor to the rich at an alarming rate.

Now 30 years after, the jubilant triumph of neo-liberalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere it has now suddenly crashed dragging global industrial and financial giants like Ford Motors and Lehman Bros into bankruptcy. It is an irony of history that the first decade of the 21st Century which Western prophets described as an era where Communism would have been laid to rest for ever witnessed the decay of the Western empires and the ascendance of Communist China as a super-power on the world stage.

Sri Lanka, in the meantime was gripped with violent terrorism and a civil war for three decades and it is just a few days ago that it became really free. Not only was it freed from terror but also it was freed from being vulnerable to external intervention and threats to its sovereignty.

We have to develop a strategy for development in the context of this geo-political and national reality. Besides, there is an over-reaching concern in today's world on a much more universal and much more critical issue, viz., climate change. If not tackled in unison it is formidable enough to make life on Earth extinct.

Incidentally it is the very development model followed by the majority of the countries of the world, principally of the so-called First World that has brought this calamity to the doorstep of humanity. This development has never been sustainable. Nor has it been equitable.

A handful of the rich countries have been consuming the resources of the Earth in the most extravagant and selfish manner, expropriating to themselves the riches of the majority whom they have subjugated at the point of the bayonet and the cannons.

It is in this context that development as measured hitherto in economic indicators such as the Gross Domestic Product or the per capita income has become meaningless. Any development, to be meaningful should be sustainable and ensure equity in distribution of wealth within countries as well as among countries.

A new horizon for North, East fishermen

Nearly two third of the Sri Lankan coast line is in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. In order to ensure safety and security of the people, the fishing activities in these areas had been restricted during the past few decades. But soon after the Northern Province was liberated,on the intervention of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Senior Presidential Advisor MP Basil Rajapaksa these restrictions were lifted.

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Sri Lanka’s Foreign Policy

In 1954, six years after independence, Sri Lanka’s application to be a full member of the United Nations was forestalled by Russia on the grounds that Sri Lanka was not a fully independent state. In fact, we were not, because we had British troops stationed at Trincomalee and were a ‘protectorate’ of Britain and would not have been capable of independent thinking in a world forum.

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Positioning Sri Lanka Tourism

Positioning - a pivotal concept in Marketing is about owning a particular position of an organization’s product/service or any offering of value in the minds of a well defined groups of customers. In sum, it is about getting one’s offering into the mind(s) of a targeted consumer(s), and occupying a particular place or position therein.

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