By Garvin Karunaratne
500,000
jobs lost-Local Vehicle Industry(The Island 13/3/21) sends my mind to many instances in my
experience that offer an immediate solution.
Near my home on Old Kesbewa
Road Gangodawila Nugegoda there is a man making oil filters. He has been making those since the Sixties and selling them some where. In the UK and US where I have happened to have lived
for years there are local makers of oil filters. It is very rare for a
manufacturer’s oil filter to be obtained from as far as France for a Peugeot or Germany for a BMW.
Instead there are local oil filters, silencers,
radiators and many other car parts.
Once long ago in
Bangladesh in 1983 I decided on a motor
trip from Dhaka to Khatmandu in Nepal. It was a four thousand mile trip in an
old Toyota Publica and the travelers were my wife and two of my sons. It was a
forbidding trip and many told me not to.
We set off and in two hundred miles at Jessore there was a big bang. I
got out to find my silencer torn to bits. I was near Jessore where I stayed at
the Circuit Bungalow. The next morning I
went to a local garage and waited till they opened the doors. The owner entrusted the task to a welder. The
car was jacked up. Out came the silencer in pieces. The welder made a note of
the pieces and took measurements. He brought a sheet of metal and I saw him carefully
measuring and cutting it to pieces. He commenced welding and in less than two
hours emerged a silencer in looks very close to what was taken out. It was
fixed in minutes and in two hours I was on the road with a bang. The beat of
the engine was perfect and it was sound even for my full 4000 mile trip and
also for another two years use till I sold my car.
Back in Colombo in 1997 when
the silencer of my Peugeot 307 packed in it was Pathma Silencers that made a
silencer .It took eight hours of stay at the garage and it was not a patch on
the two hours work at Jessore.
My next instance travels back
to when I was a Deputy Director of Small Industry. Kariyawasam the Member of
Parliament for Elpitiya saw me with a strapper lad who brought a number of side
mirrors of cars that he had made and wanted an
allocation of foreign exchange to
import mirrors. The side mirrors were of the correct shape and looked good. I
sent an inspector to see his factory and report. In a few days time the
inspector reported that it was a sham- the youth had no work place and could
only produce a bag of tools. It was a firm rejection.. I phoned Kariawasam and
gave him a piece of my mind for pulling my leg. No, that youth is not a sham,
he is a good worker, he was adamant.. I told him to inform the youth that I
will be at Elpitiya the next morning. He informed the youth. I was told to meet
him at the Cooperative Society garage. I was there in time and the youth came
in with a large heavy bag full of tools
and metal rods. I asked him where he made the side mirrors. He pointed out the
garage where lorries were to be parked. He said he has to wait till a lorry
comes in to obtain the lorry jack. I understood why my inspector rejected him.
The youth did not have a semblance of a
factory. The manner the youth spoke was very convincing. He showed me
his tools and he had many of different types and he showed me rods with bolts
at each end and he implored me to wait.
We waited. In came a lorry and he borrowed the jack. He sat in a corner and
within minutes assembled the rods to
make a jig. He placed the jack at the bottom, put in cut pieces of metal- cut
by him in my presence and got them turned into various shapes. I carefully
looked at it and some were close –exact replicas that matched the side mirrors
of different makes of cars. I gave him a foreign exchange allocation on the
spot. I thanked Kariyawasam.
What these three instances
tell me is that our salesmen and our motor car sales people should embark on
making all parts of cars.
We have to actively get going
with industries to make motor spares.
Instead of import licences for
importing car spares, the import allocations should be to import metal sheets
and welding equipment.
It wont take long for our
welders to make car spares. I have seen
many of them at work in my eighteen
years’ ramblings all over the island.
But there is a big but.
In Sri Lanka- the Governments
have been hard on the private sector. Once the Government took away all estates
over 50 acres and this ruined our plantation agriculture. One of my uncles died
because of this take over that deprived his life’s savings- an estate of some
400 acres at Hayes- a loss he could not bear.. The rent laws that restrict
rents and also forbid owners to get their rented properties back forbid building homes. Naturally the rich get
used to find avenues overseas to use their wealth.
The answer is simple- waiting
for the Private Sector to take charge is wishful thinking. The FDI-Foreign
Direct Investment which the IMF holds for us to follow and which
Minister Cabral, our one and only economic specialist even now believes
will happen is never going to be a reality.
The Government has to act fast like in the NM-Sirimavo days when they
created a seperate Ministry under the Prime Minister herself and head hunted
the most eminent economist in the island Professor HAdeS Gunasekera and
established a new programme to bring about employment to the youth. That was
the DDCP- the Divisional Development
Councils Programme.
In Kotmale the Divisional Secretary created a Paper Making Industry with waste
paper collected from the Nuwara Eliya katcheri within months- the equal of
which we have yet failed to establish. Since the Eighties the President
Jayawardena industry was to collect waste paper and export to India –some
30,000 tons a month to earn a few coppers and to import paper paying for it in
dollars. We have yet failed to understand the ‘economics’ of selling waste
paper and buying paper. We are perhaps the only country that does not use waste
paper to make paper. Find a consultant to get that done – give a call to the
Ministry of Youth in Bangladesh and ask them to send one of my youths who
collect wastepaper and make paper. There are a few of them. We need to have our heads examined.
Then in Matara as the
Government Agent when the Ministry of Plan Implementation was very happy with
the Boat yard I established within 3 months and refused to approve any more
industries , I took charge and did three months of experiments every night,
locked up at the Rahula College science
lab and unearthed the art of making
crayons. The king pin scientist was my Planning Officer a chemistry grad from
Colombo, helped by the science teachers. Then Sumanapala Dahanayake the Member
of Parliament for Deniyaya in his capacity as the President of the Morawak
Korale Coop Union took charge of establishing the factory- he did it working
day and night in three weeks. In the third week when we had filled two large
rooms of crayons, Sumanapala and I took
off to meet our Minister of Industries
Mr Subasinghe and he was surprised at the quality and he opened sales in the
fourth week and Sumanapala developed the industry to have island wide sales.
When we were refused a small allocation of forex to import dyes, by the
Ministry of Industries we were lost. We then found that the Ministry of Imports
was about to import crayons and we moved to Harry Guneratne the Controller of
Imports. It did not take long to convince him that by giving us a small
allocation of forex to import dyes from the funds earmarked for imports of crayons,
he can make large saving in forex. This had never been done earlier.
Minister Illangaratne was quick to approve it and ordered the stoppage of all imports of
crayons.
Can all this be done within
the three more years of our President.
The answer is Yes. It is a firm Yes. It can be done. I can speak with authority
because I created the Youth Self Employment Programme in Bangladesh within
eighteen months and trained the youth officers to carry it on and thus was born the largest and most successful
employment creation programme the world has known- a programme that has guided
over three million to be self employed.
within three decades. The ILO had
failed in a similar task at Tangail, Bangladesh which increased my stature in
Bangladesh.
I commenced the Youth Self
Employment Programme in Bangladesh in April 1982. We did work fast. My Youth Workers and Deputy Directors of Youth
trained by me in economics and methods of guiding youths, were training guiding some two thousand
youths on a day to day basis goading and building up the abilities of youths,
the drop out of the education system to establish enterprises and in some eighteen months the
youths built up farms and ventures of their own. Some even came to enter the
taxing bracket. Of the 479 youths who
commenced their enterprises in the first few months, 55 earned a net income over 1000Tk a month
and 144 earned over 500 Tk a month, all achieved within eighteen months. At that time Tk 500 was the
income of a clerical officer in the public service. We were training 2000
youths and now(2021) we train 160,000 a year. By now(2021) this Programme has
guided over 3 million youths to be self employed. It is easily the largest and
most successful employment creation programme ever.
I met the Hon Minister for
Labour and Manpower, Hon Aminul Islam, the third in command of the military
junta only twice- the first was the day I had a two hours argument where I had
to prove that I could establish the self employment programme in the face of the
dismal failure of the ILO attempt to create such a programme, when he approved my establishing the
programme and on the last day I worked in Bangladesh, when I requested him to
make an order that the youths on my programme who had earnings sufficient to be
taxed should be given a reprieve not to
be taxed for a few years. He kindly agreed.
We have stopped all non food
imports. Now through devious methods importers have cashed in. In Cargills I
have seen for sale Lorenz Natural Salted
Potatoe Chips all the way from Germany mind you a packet of 500grams at Rs 520.
We can easily make potatoes chips and banana chips at less than half that
price.. This industry can easily be set up
in a week and we can look forward to three industries making potatoe
crisps at Boralanda and two banana crisp factories at Rambukkana and
Godakawela. My Divisional Secretary at Rambukkana Sarath Indatissa would have
established a banana crisp factory in
two to three days. He would work for 48 hours non stop, He was that smart and very fast. In those
Premier Dudley days we were not authorized to establish new industries. That
was also how we established the Crayon Factory at Morawaka when all of us broke
rest for three weeks- a 24 hour a day operation. Mind you Sumanapala Dahanayake
developed it to have islandwide sales. It was President Jayawardena that
ordered the stoppage of all three industries; Paper, Boat Making and Crayon
Making to please the IMF in 1978.
That was not all. Deputy Commissioner NT Ariyaratne.disclosed
to me that President Jayawardena instructed him to proceed to Morawaka and
inspect the Crayon Cooperative Factory and
to find something to hang Sumanapala Dahanayake.. Ariyaratne after three
days of investigation, including – a forensic audit had to report that the Cooperative Crayon
Factory was in good health and its finances were in proper order. That was the
FCID of the Jayawardena days in action.
Then I also came across in
Cargills, Soyafresh Soya Milk- a litre
pack made in Malaysia, sold at Rs. 660. . Kotmale or Ambewela could have easily
done this without incurring any foreign exchange, at half this cost..
Our importers have hoodwinked
our Government.
We have to get back to the pre 1977 days when all imports have to
be vetted and approved only if we cannot make it. I was one of the sleuths that
controlled small industry and unless this is done we will continue to waste our
hard earned foreign exchange.
We have to open up two major industries a Metal Hardware Industry
and a Woodwork Industry, which will make anything in metal or wood, liaise with
the Private Sector and make everything that the Private Sector does not make.
If there is anything that Sri Lanka cannot make, which the country requires these two organizations will make or if they
cannot make recommend an import. allocation.
These details are provided to prove that we
can work fast and we have the ability to tackle the problems of unemployment
and poverty if only our President will give the green light for import substitution
type of industry to be commenced and set up the infrastructure to guide small
industry.
This is nothing new. Once in
1970-1977 we did establish industries and created employment. The SUCCESS
achieved in Paper Making at Kotmale and
the Boat Building and Crayon Making in Matara prove to the hilt that it will be
a success. There are no FDIs- Foreignb Direct Investors coming to help us. Creating employment and
poverty alleviation is a task that can
be done by us. It is far easier to achieve this than defeating the Monster
LTTE. I look forward to the days when the Gotabhaya-Mahinda juggernaut will
actually get going in Sri Lanka. To my thinking that day is not far away. Let
me live in hope.
Garvin Karunaratne, Ph D.
Michigan State University
Former SLAS, G.A. Matara
Author of How the IMF Ruined Sri
Lanka & Alternative Programmes of Success, Godages, 2006
How the IMF Sabotaged Third
World Development, Kindle/Godages, 2017
16/3/2001
