ECONOMYNEXT – Sri Lanka’s planned 75,000 in new recruitments announced in the budget is mostly for skilled grades, and there are plans to ‘rightsize’ the bloated public sector over time, Deputy Minister for Industries Chathuranga Abeysinghe has said.
“I think we first have to admit where we are, because it’s been bloated up, not in the levels of executives and skills grades,” Deputy Minister Abeysinghe told a post-budget seminar organized by Deloitte.
“Mostly, it’s bloated up at the bottom tier, because previous governments wanted to give jobs to people who voted for them.
“What we are trying to do is resizing and bringing technology so that we could make things efficient.
“The current 75,000 recruitments are for very specific required skill like nurses, the teachers, and the technical staff, and the engineers.”
Sri Lanka has a public sector including SOEs and boards of around 1.35 million which expanded rapidly after 2005. But the ‘approved cadre’ is close to 1.5 million.
Sri Lanka has so-called ‘development officers’ of around 100,000 who graduates taught at tax payer expense who are stuffed into various state offices, including district secretary officer, without office space to sit according to some spokesmen.
Sri Lanka had 102,681 ‘Development Officers’ as of end December 2024, while there was also an ‘approved cadre’ of 77,796 with questions being asked as to what useful role they perform.
Sri Lanka also did not go on a demobilizing drive after the war unlike other countries. Without a voluntary early retirement plan there have been thousands of deserters. Some of them have been recruited by the underground according to some of the arrests made recently.
Unlike formal retirees, deserters are not always able to get legal jobs in the formal sector, according to some observers.
“If you take the military, it will tail off because the majority which were hired during 2006, 7, and 8, or 7, 8, and 9, they are completing their 20 years.
“They will come out of that military workforce. Now we are trying to see how do we upskill them and integrate them into the industry or entrepreneurship.”
While there may be some voluntary retirement schemes, there were no plans for widespread redundancies, which may affect livelihoods, he said.
“But I think with the technology coming into each of the institutions, the rightsizing will happen over a period of time, I would say, 3 to 5 years,” Minister Abeysinghe said.
In 2024, the burden of the public sector reduced for the first time in many years.
Though the public are supposed to pay taxes mostly for education and health, even middle class households are now turning to ‘international schools’ with the deteriorating quality of state education and universities which are turning out unemployable graduates.
Middle class tax-payers have for many years being ‘channeling’ private doctors at their own expense while paying taxes to support unemployed graduates and state enterprises which are also need capital in addition to cash to cover their losses of badly managed ones.
During the Rajapaksa regime, some previously privatized enterprises including in Sugar, were re-expropriated and now need tax payer funds to keep them afloat. (Colombo/No13/2025)
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