Resting on our laurels: Human Development, Sri Lanka’s successes and challenges

By Ms.Priyanthi Fernando

Sri Lanka has some impressive human development indicators compared to its South Asian neighbours. In the UNDP’s Human Development Ranking, Sri Lanka is ranked 97 th, higher than India (134th) or Pakistan, or Bangladesh (145th and 146th) or Nepal (157th) (UNDP, 2011). This is largely the result of egalitarian public policies since Independence that have sought to reduce poverty and ensure a minimum standard of living for all through free education and health services, food rations and subsidy schemes. These schemes were maintained despite different political orientations, war and insurrections, changes to the economy , and to the demographic composition of the population, and have contributed to achievements in human development and to Sri Lanka’s MDG record. This paper provides some insights into this history of public policy implementation in Sri Lanka but argues that the country cannot, and should not, rest on its laurels. Drawing on the work of the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) in the last 10 years, and the work of other social scientists, this paper outlines the many challenges that remain. It points to some anomalies in human development in Sri Lanka, highlights the less visible characteristics of poverty and discusses, briefly, the way these challenges are being tackled (or not) by different actors, including those directly facing the challenges.

The HistorySri Lanka’s policy since independence and until mid 1970s has had a high emphasis on

human development. Education in Government schools was made free of charge in 1938 following the granting of universal franchise in 1931. The colonial education policies had created socio-economic, ethnic, religious and regional disparities in the provision of education and its outcomes, and the advocates of free education aimed to address these inequalities. From 1943, subsidies on the cost of food were begun, and a food ration system was introduced in 1948. A little over two decades later, in 1973, the government began the Thriposha programme, targeting pregnant mothers and young children. By 1950 the government had introduced free health services. In the 1950s and 1960s about one third of the budgetary expenditure, was allocated for welfare (Ratnayake, 1998) and expenditure on health and education constituted 9.96% of GDP in the 1960s and 9.5% of GDP in the 1970s. Following the 1971 insurrection, the government introduce more measures for reducing inequality and disparities, such as land reform, ceiling on housing ownership, compulsory savings, nationalization of private enterprise.

This emphasis on equity in the provision of social services can be seen through different lenses. It has been criticized because of its negative impact on economic growth, especially when the revenue from the plantation economy was no longer able to support it. (Amirthalingam, 2008). It has been seen as an covertly political agenda, a consequence of universal franchise, and targeted at garnering the majority vote. Whatever the motivations, this author argues that many of Sri Lanka’s celebrated

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achievements in human development are a result of the social development policies of successive Sri Lankan governments, and not a consequence purely of economic growth.

Positive Headline IndicatorsIn terms of human development, Sri Lanka has been punching well above our weight as

a low income country that has just graduated to middle income status. The current headline indicators continue to be positive. GDP growth today is 8% and the Poverty Head Count Index (measured as the percentage of people below a certain threshold, or poverty line, and calculated on the basis of the ability to consume a certain caloric intake)has dropped from 22.7% in 2002, to 8.9% in 2009. Sri Lanka has also achieved the MDG target of universal primary education. Health indicators are also considerably more positive than many other developing countries: average life expectancy is 77 years for women and 72 for men; maternal mortality is 39.3 per 100,000 births; infant mortality is 1.3 infant deaths per 1,000 births; and almost 100% of births are assisted by health personnel . All these statistics do not include the areas of the war affected north and east.

The ChallengesThe positive headline indicators are not an excuse for Sri Lanka to rest on its laurels.

There are many human development challenges that have yet to be faced and overcome if equity continues to be our goal. They include the disparities in income growth and poverty reduction, the low investments in education and health, many horizontal inequities, including gender based violence, and the challenges of rebuilding livelihoods and restoring well being of communities in the war affected areas.

Challenge 1: Disparities in income growth and poverty reductionIncomes and poverty reduction are not equal across geographical and other spaces.

Geographical inequality has been recognized as an issue since the last census in 2002, when the government used small area estimation techniques to provide decentralised poverty and basic service provision statistics (Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka, 2002). At this point, the government identified 119 DS divisions that were poor in terms of consumption poverty (measured by the poverty head count index) and access to other basic services. This estimation did not include the north and eastern districts.

The more recent statistics, based on the 2009 Household Income and Expenditure Survey and other data from the Department of Census and Statistics, suggests that Western province contributes 45% of GDP; that even though poverty levels have reduced there is a marked difference between provinces, with the the poverty head count index being 4.2 % for the Western province, 14.7% for the Eastern province and 13.7% for the Uva Province. From the available data it would seem also that poverty has increased in the Eastern province, particularly in Batticoloa District (Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka, 2011), and that urban poverty maybe significantly underestimated by the current method of measurement (Kulasabanathan & Mayadunne, 2011)

In addition to regional disparities, there are also disparities between different occupational groups. Daily wage labourers, households reliant on rainfed farming, and small producers of tea in the mid

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country, for instance, tend to have less income (Rathnayaka & Fernando, 2009)There are also interesting differences in the way income has grown between sectors, and over in time.

Chart 1: Mean household income growth rate 2006-2009 by sector and income deciles

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

-20

-15

-10

-5

0

5

10

15

hhd mean income growth rate (%)2006-2009

Urban hhd mean income growth rate (%)2006-2009

Rural hhd mean income growth rate (%)2006-2009

Estate hhd mean income growth rate (%)2006-2009Household income deciles

Growth rate (%)

Source: Growth rate calculations based on DCS, HIES 2006/7, 2009/10 data

Chart 1 shows that urban sector incomes had a negative growth in the period 2006-2009, across all income deciles, but was dramatically negative among the upper income deciles. Estate households in the poorer deciles had not much income growth, but households within the higher income deciles were able to grow their incomes more. Rural household income grew at a very modest rate, with the richest decile seeing a sharp increase.

From Chart 2 we can say that the period 2002-2006 (in areas excluding the north and the east) overall the growth in household income was very high, and relatively even across income-deciles in and that in the period 2006-2009 the growth rate was much lower and more varied, with the lowest and highest deciles exhibiting negative growth.

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Chart 2: Mean household income growth across income deciles 2002-2006, and 2006-2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

-4.0

-2.0

0.0

2.0

4.0

6.0

8.0

10.0

Hhd mean income growth rate (%)2002-2006Hhd mean income growth rate (%)2006-2009

HH income deciles

Growth rate

Source: Growth rate calculations based on DCS, HIES 2002, 2006/7, 2009/10 data

CEPA’s study on Inclusive Growth (de Silva, Gunatilaka, Lokuge, & Meedeniya, 2012) identifies key drivers for household income growth using statistical measures which were then further explored through complementary qualitative studies. The drivers included infrastructure, especially mobile telephony, educational attainment, especially where the local economy demanded a high level of education and skills or where there were opportunities for educated members of the household to migrate and transfer incomes to the households; and the move from traditional to more cash oriented agriculture (de Silva, Gunatilaka, Lokuge, & Meedeniya, 2012)Employment in manufacturing and services does not help poverty reduction, when poor households are concentrated in the bottom level jobs.

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Challenge 2: Low investments in education and healthWhile Sri Lanka’s education and health indicators continue to be better than many of her neighbours, , the potential for sustaining these indicators is constrained by the low levels of state investment in the sector. The Central Bank Annual reports suggest that the government expenditure on education and health have been increasing monetary terms, but their value as a percentage of GDP has been declining. Table 1 below shows the changes that have occurred over the last four years.

Table 1: Public expenditure on Education and Health 2008-2011

% of GDP on education

Total Expenditure on Education (Rs billion)

% of GDP on health

Total Expenditure on Health (Rs billion)

2011 1.9 121.3 1.4 89.22010 1.9 104.2 1.3 73.82009 2.1 100.5 1.5 71.52008 2.3 100.1 1.7 74.5Source: Central Bank Annual Reports

One consequence of this is that peoples’ out of pocket expenses for accessing education and health care is increasing, and eroding the free system. There are challenges in the delivery of both education and health that the state has to deal with. In education, the challenges are related mostly to equity, and the quality of education being provided. In health, some of the challenges are a result of the success of the health sector itself.

Education

Despite high enrolment figures, 9% do not complete primary education, only 80% of the cohort is enrolled in secondary education, and 39% at university entrance. A study carried out by the Institute of Policy Studies (Arunatilake, 2010) shows that access to education is inequitable at all levels. The statistics indicate that there are spatial disparities in access to education, and that primary education completion for instance is lowest in the Uva, Central, North Western and Eastern provinces. Access to education is also difficult for those with low incomes and for communities on the tea and rubber plantations. The relationship between material deprivation and lack of access to education can be illustrated with the statistics that show that poverty incidence is high among households where the head has a low educational achievement. The inability to break from the interaction between inequitable access to education and poverty could cause intergenerational or chronic poverty among certain groups.

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Chart 3: Poor and non-poor households by educational achievement of the head of household (2006/7)

No schooling

Up to grade 5

Grade 5-10

Passed G.C.E. (O.L)

Passed G.C.E (A.L.) & above

Not stated

0.0 5.0 10.0 15.0 20.0 25.0 30.0 35.0 40.0 45.0 50.0

Poor (%)Non-poor (%)

Source: (Department of Census and Statistics, 2009)

Other issues relate to the quality of education, particularly the lack of science and IT capacity in most schools that restricts the usefulness of the education imparted, and contributes to the existence of relatively high level of educated unemployed (Table 2 below). Sri Lanka has already paid a heavy price for the lack of opportunities for those graduating from the education system: the two southern insurrections and to some degree the frustrations of the Tamil youth, were all related to the inequities of the education system.

Table 2: Unemployment rate by level of education

Level of Education Total GenderMale Female

Total 4.9 3.5 7.7Grade 5 & Below 0.7 0.6 0.8Grade 6-10 3.6 2.8 5.8G.C.E. (O/L) 6.9 5.4 10.1G.C.E. (A/L) & above 11.6 7.9 15.8

Source: Labour Force Survey Annual Report 2010 (Department of Census and Statistics, 2011)

Health

Health sector challenges include tackling persistent malnutrition, dealing with the demographic transition, providing health and nutrition services to the war affected areas, and improving health services to plantation workers, and may require greater investment or some reform of how health services are delivered.

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The persistence of malnutrition among children and pregnant and lactating mothers is a conundrum of Sri Lankan society. Despite many achievements in the health sector, a relatively high level of female education and countless initiatives to address malnourishment, child nutritional levels have not improved significantly (Jayawardena, 2011)

Chart 4: Underweight children and low birth weight babies, 2000 and 2006Graph sourced from (Jayawardena, 2011)

Jayewardena ( (2011) shows that this situation is worse for some groups – for instance children in the estate sector are particularly worse off and in the Badulla district, 1 in 3 children are underweight. Malnutrition is also related to household income, to mothers’ nutritional status, and to mothers’ level of education.

Chart 5: Underweight births and underweight children, 2006Graph sourced from (Jayawardena, 2011)

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Chart 6: Underweight births and underweight children by wealth quintiles , 2006Graph sourced from (Jayawardena, 2011)

Sri Lanka’s improved health indicators have resulted in higher life expectancies, and a cohort of older people, with attendant health service delivery issues of dealing with non-communicable diseases, getting services to the elderly, and paying more attention to disability. A World Bank Health, Nutrition and Population discussion paper (Engelgau, Okamoto, Navaratne, & Gopalan, 2010) says that during the past half-century the proportion of deaths due to circulatory disease (such as heart disease and stroke) has increased from 3 percent to 24 percent, while that due to infectious diseases has decreased from 42 percent to 20 percent. It also goes on to say that mortality rates from NCDs are currently 20–50 percent higher in Sri Lanka than in developed countries. The incidence of NCDs varies between the rich and the poor with heart disease higher among the rich and asthma higher among the poor.

The government has recognized the need to reduce the morbidity from NCD, also the importantance of getting health services to older people. Many older people are left to care for themselves, because children are either working or have moved to a town leaving a parent behind in the village and a primary health care system that is targeted to their needs must be put into place (Ministry of Healthcare and Nutrition, 2009).

Challenge 3: Gender inequity and the spread of gender based violenceThe headline indicators, the MDG achievements, all point to parity in gender based enrolments in education, with women outstripping men in some areas of tertiary education.

Table 3: Proportion of Pupils Starting Grade 1 who reach Grade 5, by sex

1990 2002 2006/07Overall 68.1 95.6 99.6Male 64.1 94.7 99.3Female 72.6 96.5 99.8Source: Annual School Census and Special Survey on Millennium Development Goals (2006/07), Department of Census and Statistics in (Institute of Policy Studies, 2010)

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Table 4: Ratio of Girls to Boys in Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Education

Level Ratio of Girls to Boys (%)1996 2002 2006/07

Primary 94.2 94.6 99.0

Junior Secondary 91.2 94.8 105.7Senior Secondary 107.7 101.8Tertiary 75.4 113.8 -Source: DCS (2009). (Institute of Policy Studies, 2010)

However, despite these indicators, and despite the fact that there seem to be few barriers for some women to achieve high office – Sri Lanka has had the first woman head of state and currently the Chief Justice and Attorney General are both women – women’s participation in the labour force and in the political sphere are significantly low. Labour force participation of women has been hovering around 33% since 2000 (in areas outside of the northern and eastern provinces) and women’s unemployment rate at 6.7% (in the third quarter of 2011) is more than twice that of men, 2.5%. (Department of Census and Statistics, 2011) So despite the high ratio of young women to men in the tertiary education sector, these educated women are more challenged than their male counterparts to find employment. A study of graduate employment and unemployment carried out in 2002 has pointed to the continuing concentration of women undergraduates in arts courses and the preponderance of arts graduates (both women and men) among the unemployed (Jayaweera & Sanmugam, 2002). There is also evidence to show that both in the government and private sectors even though women comprise 61.9% of the work force there are glass ceilings that prevent women from achieving senior positions. Women are only 23.7% of the senior officials and managers in the government and private sector. (ref)

Women representatives in national and provincial levels is lower in Sri Lanka than in most other South Asian countries. In 2009 of 255 seats in Parliament women held 13, which amounts to around 5 percent. There has been some increase in women candidates at the provincial council elections since 2004, much of this has been due to higher nominations been given by smaller parties who rarely win seats in an election. The two major parties, the UPFA, and the UNP continued to disregard women candidates. In 2008/2009 women were 4.3% of total UPFA nominations and 3.3% of UNP. (Kodikara, 2009). The number of women elected to provincial councils is 16, and constitute just 4% of the seats.

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Table 5: Gender composition of elected provincial councillors, 2009

Provincical Council District Total Male Female% of female

Uva Province 34 33 1 3Western 104 98 6 6Central 58 55 3 5North-western 52 50 2 4North-central 33 32 1 3Sabaragamuwa 44 43 1 2Eastern 37 36 1 3Southern 55 54 1 2Total 417 401 16 4

Source: Department of Elections 2009 in (International Conference on Population and Development, 2009)

Gender based violenceAt present there is no systematic way of collecting data on gender based violence, and as such there are no way of systematically estimating the extent of its incidence at a national level in Sri Lanka. However, from reported incidents to oganisations working with women who are victims of violence, police and hospital records, and some small sample surveys, one could say that the incidence of domestic violence, or intimate partner violence is high. In 2002, a UNFPA sponsored study of women attending antenatal and gyneacological clinics in a hospital in Anuradhapura, showed that 48% of the women had been beaten and 11% had had external injuries. Another study done in the same year on physical abuse among pregnant women in Badulla district found that 18.3% of women had been abused sometime during their entire period of cohabitation, 10.6% of women had been abused during the last year and 4.7% of women had been abused during the current pregnancy. A survey at the Outpatient Department of the Teaching Hospital in Ragama, a semiurban area in the suburbs of Colombo, found that 40.7% of women had been abused by their partners. (Ministry of Health Care and Nutrition and WHO, 2009)

In Sri Lanka, the Penal Code does not criminalize domestic violence. Prosecution of domestic violence therefore has to be undertaken under other general sections of assault or causing grevious hurt, but these are rarely used, mainly because social conditions prevent women from reporting incidents of domestic violence, and even when they do, complaints are not often taken seriously by the authorities, or women are pushed to use informal mediation mechanisms to settle the cases. The Prevention of Domestic Violence Act, No. 34 of 2005 makes provisions for the court to grant protection orders to prevent an aggressor from inflicting harm to persons within the home environment, but it is only a civil remedy and has no bearing on the normal criminal law jurisdiction. Domestic violence legislation in many other countries permits a wider base of intervention in court, but Sri Lanka does not go that far> ( (Ministry of Health Care and Nutrition and WHO, 2009)

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Challenge 4: Rebuilding Livelihoods and Communities in the North and East

Three decades of war has left areas of the northern and eastern provinces devastated in terms of infrastructure, economy, livelihood opportunities and access to services for its residents, not to mention the trauma of multiple displacements and constant violence. All of Sri Lanka’s headline indicators and social development achievements, have been calculated without taking the north and east into account. Some of these areas are sparsely populated, and it is likely that their inclusion in the national statistics may not make a significant impact on the headline figures. But the disaggregated information that should come out from recent statistical surveys and the 2012 Census of Population, are likely to paint a challenging picture of the area.

Already, poverty figures are beginning to indicate Batticoloa as one of the poorest districts in the north and east, with a Poverty Head Count Index of 20.3 (Department of Census and Statistics, 2011)In addition there are a numerous issues of access to resources for the poorest, particularly access to land and fishing resources. The land issue is complicated mainly because of multiple claims to ownership. The Muslim eviction from the North in 1990, and the departure of groups of Tamil people because of the war, meant that the land they left behind was either used by families who lived in those areas throughout the war, and in some cases were issued land title by the LTTE. There are also issues of loss of documentation or simply lack of it, and the difficulties in demarcating boundaries. Women seem particularly vulnerable in making their claims to land, because many of them are unaware of or unable to cope with the process.

The increased militarization seems to be also a problem that will constrain the development of these areas. A recent article in Economic and Political Weekly suggests that there is one security personnel for every 5.04 civilians in the Northern province, or a force density of 198.4 security personnel per 1,000 civilians even though the war has ended for over 3 years! This compares with 20 per thousand civilians in Iraq in 2007, 23 in Northern Island in the mid 1970s, 150 soldiers per 1000 civilians in Chechnya during the second Chechnyan war, and only about 38 per 1000 population in Jammu Kashmir (Economicand POlitical Weekly, 2012).

There are also inherent issues of dependency on remittances and donor funding, trauma associated with the conflict, and the tensions resulting in changes in the social structures. The institutions in the north and east are slowly being rebuilt, but it is not clear whether the social infrastructure is being put into place with the same drive as the economic infrastructure. Despite the latter, there are still areas that are deprived of basic infrastructure services. Studies in the East have shown that in many post-war, resettled areas, poor families are engaged in activities at the bottom end of the value chain with limited opportunities to add value. It will be a long road to recovery.

Summary and ConclusionThis paper has tried to show that Sri Lanka’s Human Development Indicators are largely the outcome of past policies that emphasized equity even during periods of low growth. Our achievement of “middle income status” indicates that basic needs have been met, but that there are significant disparities. The

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successes themselves have generated new challenges: the challenge of a changing demographic, for instance. Global trends point to the importance of using our education to develop a ‘knowledge economy’, another challenge. And finally, the growing disparities and inequalities beg the question, is this the path of ‘development’ that we want to take? Is the focus on growth sufficient?

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