{"id":77060,"date":"2018-05-02T15:03:57","date_gmt":"2018-05-02T22:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=77060"},"modified":"2018-05-02T15:03:57","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T22:03:57","slug":"needed-21-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/05\/02\/needed-21-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Needed: 21-A"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>The Editorial Courtesy The Island<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span class=\"article_date\">May 2, 2018, 12:00 pm<\/span><br \/>\nTwenty seven State and Deputy Ministers were sworn in, yesterday, before President Maithripala Sirisena, who seems to think that he can usher in good governance by reshuffling the Cabinet. Nobody knows how many more ministers will be appointed in the coming weeks. It looks as if an MP could become a minister by threatening to leave the government or rebelling against the leaders of either the SLFP or the UNP. That may be the reason why some UNP backbenchers are staging protests and criticising the party leadership openly.<\/p>\n<p>With those sworn in, yesterday, now we have 114 ministers, including 42 in the Cabinet and 45 in the provincial councils for a population of only 21 million. If India were to adopt this ratio, god forbid, it would have at least 7,000 ministers at the Centre and in the states.<\/p>\n<p>Indians are lucky that the 91st Amendment (91-A) to their Constitution prevents the number of ministers either in the union government or in state governments from exceeding 15 percent of the total number of members of the Lower House of Parliament or the state legislature respectively.<\/p>\n<p>The yahapalana leaders\u2019 predilection for Indian models is only too well known. Strangely, they don\u2019t seem keen to take a leaf out of India\u2019s book anent the number of ministers.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, it does not make sense to have as many as 225 MPs, because there are nine provincial councils with 441 members. The number of MPs should be drastically reduced.<\/p>\n<p>The JVP has proposed the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, seeking the abolition of the executive presidency. This move has gone down well with some political parties and civil society outfits. Let the Rathu Sahodarayas be urged to propose another amendment, modelled on India\u2019s 91-A, to limit the number of ministers, without provision for increases on any grounds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Editorial Courtesy The Island May 2, 2018, 12:00 pm Twenty seven State and Deputy Ministers were sworn in, yesterday, before President Maithripala Sirisena, who seems to think that he can usher in good governance by reshuffling the Cabinet. Nobody knows how many more ministers will be appointed in the coming weeks. It looks as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77060","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=77060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}