{"id":63864,"date":"2017-03-02T12:13:03","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T19:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=63864"},"modified":"2017-03-02T12:13:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T19:13:03","slug":"we-should-not-prohibit-demonstrations-but-charge-for-the-national-losses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/03\/02\/we-should-not-prohibit-demonstrations-but-charge-for-the-national-losses\/","title":{"rendered":"We should not prohibit Demonstrations but charge for the national losses\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Sarath Obeysekera<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Yesterday I was passing by the road way in front of President\u2019s office and noted some \u00a0union members of Tamil community\u00a0 holding demonstrations. By 12 noon I was going back and police was trying control another group of people holding placards protesting about something else . Doctors and some medical staff were demonstrating in front Gampaha railway station inconveniencing the public.<\/p>\n

We see that it is daily occurrence in our life<\/p>\n

We also\u00a0 heard that\u00a0 under the principles of Yahaplanaya ,government is planning to allocate certain designated areas for Demo\u2019s\u00a0 in order to minimize the inconvenience to the public .We all know that there is massive loss to the country because of loss of man hours of \u00a0working people and over consumption of fuel due to traffic jams caused\u00a0 by road blocks .<\/p>\n

There is a solution to avoid or minimize the losses if we carry out following<\/p>\n

Government should do a simple calculation of 500-1000 vehicles which burn fuel ( i,e 10 litres per vehicle for 2 hours costing 1500 Rs per vehicle and for 1000 vehicles cost will be Rs 1,500,000 ) \u00a0.Loss of productive man-hours\u00a0 ( i.e \u00a03000 people at Rs 200 per manhour costing Rs 400×3000 = Rs \u00a01,200.000 )<\/p>\n

Total loss\u00a0 is minimum\u00a0 Rs 2,700,000 \/= without considering the cost of police force and water used for \u00a0cannons !) .You may add\u00a0 another 2,300,000 Rs for maintaining law order including filing action against violators of public peace)<\/p>\n

Total cost of one single demonstration for two hours will be 5 million Rs and if one carry on demo \u00a0for 10 hours in will cost 50 million Rs to the country .<\/p>\n

My golden suggestion is allow registered unions or political parties to hold demos other than in designated \u00a0areas and impose a charge of 5 million Rs for two hours \u2013say in Lipton Circle or\u00a0 Lotus round about .This amount should be paid to National Development fund.Total contribution to \u00a0the national\u00a0 development \u00a0fund for a month will exceed \u00a0one billion Rupees. \u00a0( unions \u00a0and parties can hold demo\u2019s free during weekends !)<\/p>\n

Unions may have to increase membership fees for members including party members to cover the payment charges for holding demo\u2019s !!<\/p>\n

I am sure this action by the government will be praised by IMF and World Bank .ADB ,OECF .JAICA etc rather than increasing taxes and price of essential goods .<\/p>\n

Dr Sarath Obeysekera<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Sarath Obeysekera Yesterday I was passing by the road way in front of President\u2019s office and noted some \u00a0union members of Tamil community\u00a0 holding demonstrations. By 12 noon I was going back and police was trying control another group of people holding placards protesting about something else . Doctors and some medical staff were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}