How the other half lives...

A tourist fresh from his/her homeland walking or driving along the roads of Colombo, could not be faulted for mistaking our country as a middle income nation. Luxury apartments and shopping malls have sprung up in all parts of the capital. Fancy and latest vehicles speed along our somewhat bumpy roads. Pubs and night clubs still remain well patronized. 

The periphery presents just such an air of well-being. Yet nothing could be further away from the truth. Our country is in the throes of a financial crisis, the likes of which have never been witnessed before.

Most of our basic requirements like fuel, gas, our staple food – rice and flour, and medicaments come to us, thanks to the largesse of our giant neighbour India - of course a repayable debt.

Food inflation has today risen above the 90% mark. We are unable to repay our international debts amounting to over US$ 50 billion, meaning our country is bankrupt and we do not have foreign exchange to import essentials like fuel, gas, food or medicaments to name a few. 

Not surprisingly costs have escalated by leaps and bounds. Fuel in short supply, is rationed and costly. This means transport costs have escalated, as have the costs of even locally grown food crops, dairy and industrial products.
It has also meant children of school-going age are finding it difficult to attend school on a daily basis, as increasing transport costs are making it difficult for parents from lower income families to make ends meet.

Making a bad situation worse, the Covid-19 pandemic and its fellow-traveller - lock downs - saw job losses among workers in the informal sector swell to over 500,000. Most of the victims lived, and continue to live in the slums and shanties – ‘the inner cities’ of Colombo.

For instance, an estimated 22% being the urban poor, 50 to 60% (approximately 1,380,000 people) live in Colombo are estimated to live in slums. A 2001 survey carried out by the Colombo Municipal Council has identified a total of 77,612 families living in 1,614 low-income settlements in the city.

The living condition of these slums or ‘inner cities’ is one of inadequacy. 30% of the families do not have proper access to drinking water as the city’s pipe network only covers 56% of the low-income urban areas. In the north of the city, only 51% of the districts’ households have access to the city’s sewerage network.

The slum-dwellers make their livelihood by working as garbage handlers, cleaners, street vendors, other as pickpockets, prostitutes, small-time drug peddlers, part time construction workers on road works and petty thieves.
They form a multi-ethnic community inclusive of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Malays and other ethnic minorities.
But, and it is a big, but, more than 500,000 of them lost their employment to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. The financial crisis which followed has meant they continue to remain unemployed or have had to suffer wage cuts.

Today a casual worker earns less than Rs.1, 500 per day, but they do not receive work on a daily basis. Yet, a family of four (father, mother and two children) today need at least Rs. 30,000/- per month just to have two decent meals a day. This sum does not include educational needs, transport costs, medical needs in time of sickness or costs of clothes and footwear.

The only conclusion one can draw is that families are cutting down on the number of meals a day, and children are going to bed hungry. Worse, it indicates that very soon parents in the ‘inner cities’ will not be able to afford the cost of providing education for their children.

Bereft of sufficient food and education, these children may soon end up like the characters in Charles Dickens novel ‘Oliver Twist’, scavenging the streets and open to exploitation by criminal gangs who feed off the misery of the poor and dispossessed. Is this going to be the future of our children of tomorrow?

Are our politicians (for we do not seem to produce statesmen like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela) willing and capable of putting aside their search for personal glory and material gain to drag this country out of the economic morass they themselves dragged it into?

Or are we going to reinforce the words of poet Bishop Heber who once described Lanka as being a place “where every aspect pleases, but man alone is vile...”