Considering the nation’s critical economic situation as opined by economic analysts, federalism has financially become unsuccessful. The government expenditure has increased tremendously on the operational sector simply for maintaining the new federal structure. The government seems to be compelled to raise domestic and foreign debts just to manage salaries and allowances of the civil servants and elected representatives. As reported in the media, the government is unable to pay around 80 billion rupees to the construction contractors, 10 billion rupees for the retired teachers’ pensions, and around 10 billion rupees for civil servicemen’s pension. Likewise, it has to pay around five billion rupees as social security allowance. In addition, the government has recently decided to pay around one billion rupees to the people’s war time physically unfit fighters at a time when the nation is reeling under severe economic crisis. However, the 10-party coalition government shows no sign of seriousness to face and solve this dreadful economic situation, rather than engaging it simply in power sharing.
According to the Financial Comptroller General Office, the government has been able to collect Rs693.75 billion in revenue as of April 20 as compared to last fiscal year’s revenue collection amounting to Rs800.51 billion. This shows that the government has failed to generate one of the targeted sources of revenue which is mainly used to meet its operational expenditure. On the other hand, continuously declining exports, excessive increase in imports, declining foreign grants, liquidity crunch in the banks, sky-rocketing market prices, failure in attracting direct foreign investment and rampant corruption here and there, are the major challenges for the coalition government to seriously act on them in order to save the nation from being another Sri-Lanka.
Comments
Post a Comment