In this edition of The Kandy News we report on under-expenditure in the Kandy District administration of the central government and the Kandy municipal government. The district is reported to have returned half (Rs32m) of the Rs 64m that it had received from the treasury for micro development projects in 2006. The KMC apparently had spent less than 10% of the money that it had allocated for the maintenance of roads and buildings. These two stories say a lot about what is our wrong with our governance.

The amounts involved are so tiny both in absolute terms and relative to the needs of the community one would have expected the respective administrations to have spent all what they got and looked for additional funds. But not our elected and appointed officials.
The reasons are not clear for the failure of the divisional secretariats to implement the micro development projects. But it probably reflects gross incompetence, inefficiency and a callous disregard for public welfare on the part of the officials and the elected politicians who sit above them.

The explanation of the KMC varies from official to official. The head of engineering blames municipal policy and failure of the municipal stores to supply the requisite material for repair work. He also says that his effort to draw the attention of his supervisors including the mayor, deputy mayor and the commissioner failed to elicit any response from these worthies.
The Deputy Mayor holds the engineer responsible and blames “sabotage” on the part of officials, a standard excuse in this country when politicians want to pass the buck. The mayor dishes out his standard response to most such failures, “I am looking into the matter.”
These two incidents by themselves may be inconsequential. But an accumulation of such “small” failures in every branch of government partly explain the failure of governance in this country. When the Divisional Secretariats fail to implement the Rs 50,000 micro-development projects the main losers are poor villagers. When the KMC fails to fix the roads Kandy ratepayers suffer.

What could be done to fix this malady? At the most general level there is a need to improve the work culture in state institutions. Government officials have to be held accountable for their failures.

Second, connected to accountability is the issue of transparency. Government money is people's money and they have the right to know how the money is spent. The public will know only if government activity is transparent. Suppose the people of Kandy had known, say by June last year, that the money available for road repairs was not being used while the people suffered from bad roads there would have been public pressure on the KMC. In practice this means that citizens, civil society and the media must have the right to have such information.
Sri Lanka does not have a “Freedom of Information” law. The Ranil Wickremasinghe administration of 2002-04 had a draft bill ready but his government ended before it could be passed into law. There is no imminent risk of Mahinda Chinthana enacting such a law. In fact the opposite has happened. Last year the government issued a circular instructing officials not to give information to non-governmental organizations. This is a denial of a basic political right in a democracy where civil society organizations should have the right to find out what the government is doing with the money of the people.

Third, there is the question of capacity of government institutions to get a job of work done. Often it is assumed quite stupidly - that the government has infinite capacity to take on additional work. In fact it is the opposite. It often fails to perform even the essential services that the government alone can do well.

Merely having an over bloated bureaucracy or workers on the payroll are not indicators of capacity to work efficiently. If that were the case the recruitment of over 40,000 new graduates to the government sector in 2004 should have resulted in a demonstrable improvement in efficiency in agencies such as divisional secretariats. There is not an ounce of evidence to believe that such a thing has happened. Capacity to work efficiently is a function of a variety of factors from motivation and good management to technical knowledge. The state system is seriously deficient in all of these. There are two solutions. One is to make a serous effort to improve capacity. The other is to give to the private sector tasks that it may be able to do better.

A Bouquet for Kandy Traffic Planners

Thanks to the new traffic arrangements Kandy is again an attractive city for the motorists and traveling public to visit. The traffic authorities who are responsible for designing and implementing the scheme have to be congratulated.

The long queues of stationary or crawling vehicles along several of the main approach roads to the city, especially on Peradeniya Road, William Gopallawa Mawatha, Hantana Road, and Lake Round are no more. The congestion in the city centre, main bus stands and market area have considerably eased.

One of the major positive features of the new traffic system is making Peradeniya Road and Gopallawa Mawatha one-way. Under the old two-way system with vehicles parked on either side there was hardly any space for a smooth flow of traffic in the two opposite directions. This resulted in the slowest moving vehicles basically determining the speed of traffic each way. Now the slow-moving traffic can use the left lane and the fast moving traffic can use the right lane. This is one of the most compelling reasons to retain the new system.

But there are other advantages as well. The new system has also largely eliminated the cascading effect of traffic jams. The Bogambara Stadium junction illustrates my point. In the old system vehicles including a large number of buses from the Central Market area, Lake Round (along the road adjoining parapet wall of the Prison) and from the hospital and Hantana area met at the Bogambara Stadium junction that in the rush hours invariably created a severe traffic snarl. The situation was compounded by buses moving in and out of the bus two bus parks in Bogambara and by the intermittent closure of the railway gate at the post office junction. The resulting inter-locking traffic jams invariably spread in every direction in the neighbourhood. Prohibiting a right turn at the railway station junction and allowing vehicles from the direction of Hantana to proceed straight up to the junction near the prison gate .and then take the connecting road up to the old fire brigade has eliminated a queue of buses from the nearby bus stand occupying more than half the space of the road preventing free movement of other vehicles.

The third major positive innovation is not allowing parking of vehicles along most of the main roads and in the city centre that has also greatly contributed to ease the congestion. But parking has again been permitted in some of the city centre areas thereby diluting the beneficial effect of the new arrangement.

Fourth, those who are concerned about air pollution in Kandy town should welcome the new system that reduces the time that vehicles are stalled emitting carbon dioxide fumes.
The main complaint against the new arrangement appears to come from those who have to travel along either Peradeniya Road or Gopallawa Mawatha some extra distance to crossover to the other road as the case may be. For some there may be an additional cost in fuel and time. But that may be a false saving because delays caused by traffic congestion under the old system could have cost more fuel and time.

The traffic officials should carefully study any genuine drawbacks of the new system. But we earnestly appeal to them not to give into pressure from special interests and dilute the new system that will reduce the net gains that have been made by the Kandy community at large.

A Grateful Motorist