‘UNP tried to retrench public service’

Lakshmi de Silva

Opposition Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe recently said that the Government should immediately increase the salaries of public servants. But it was his UNF Government that issued the Public Administration circular number 16 to retrench public servants and allocated eight billion rupees to send public servants home with a compensation.

He also proposed to abolish the pension scheme of the public servants, Finance and State Revenue Minister Ranjith Siyambalapitiya said at a press conference held at the Ministry yesterday.

These utterances of the Opposition Leader were mere political slogans. The government was not ready just now to divulge the budget proposals that would benefit public servants.

The Opposition Leader has forgotten Regaining Sri Lanka Policies of his Government that sought to dilute the public service and capitulate before the IMF conditions, he said.

Under the Mahinda Chinthana policy program the number of persons recruited to the public service had increased by 27 percent in 2009 compared to 2004 and the total cadre had increased from 842,255 in 2004 to 1,071,067 up to the current year. The salary bill of the public service also increased from 91.8 billion rupees in 2003 to 280 billion rupees this year, he said.

In addition to salary increments, a cost of living allowance of Rs. 4,500 was paid to all public servants from January this year and the Government continued all other concessions provided to other sectors like providing fertilizer to farmers and feeding more than 250,000 IDPs, he noted.

Already the Government had provided 30 billion rupees to 35,000 public servants as loans during the past 3 to 4 years and salary increments of at least 125 percent during the same period while a war was ravaging the country, he said.

The Government had also implemented a health insurance scheme for the public servants while increasing the festival advance from Rs. 3,000 to 5,000.

The minimum salary of Rs. 4,650 rupees for public servants was increased to Rs. 11,730 by the UPFA government and maternity leave was increased to 252 days; the father’s entitlement being five days.

Though all the countries including Sri Lanka faced the global economic downturn in May this year, Sri Lanka now has a foreign reserve of 3,900 million dollars three times higher than what it had few months back, Siyambalapitiya said.

Sri Lanka could expect considerable growth rates in all sectors though we could not exactly predict the rates of growth just now. The State revenue had increased and definitely the government would achieve its goals in all spheres, he said.