‘Politicians should, stay away from complex policy-making’: Leave that to the experts- Harsha
Sri Lankan technocrats -not government ministers and politicians – should be authorised to decide on policy matters that need complex technical solutions. This was the view of Harsha De Silva, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, during a summing-up session of the National Summit on Innovation in Colombo on Wednesday. “The Prime Minister is serious about it and that is why he was here (at the event),” he told the audience.
Deviating slightly from the topic, he said that ‘all the time parliamentarians use unparliamentarily language’ indicating that on the schools uniform issue some people used unparliamentarily language on government officials and parliamentarians.
Discussing the topic of innovation, he said Sri Lanka is interested in sustainable development and is perhaps the first country to have sustainable development incorporated in the Government policy through an Act of Parliament. Citing an instance where complex issues should be left alone to technical experts than politicians, he said that when for a short period he was in the Ministry of Policy Planning he asked some of the policy planners why they put up (Hambantota) airport at a cost of US$250 million in a bird sanctuary. They had never thought about it but did ask they were told (or ordered to).
It cost a large amount of money to the taxpayers to repay the loans obtained to construct that airport. In this case, he pointed out, these planners would have had a Plan B and C so that it could have been used for something else in case Plan A failed. The government and the decision makers must take the responsibility in justifying why they have spent that money, Dr. De Silva said. Referring to the planning setting of an innovation lab, he threw a challenge to the creators: “Find solutions to some perennial issues haunting the country like subsidies – fertilizer subsidy, school uniform subsidy”.
The delivery cost alone of these subsidies was more than the subsidy itself. He said that methods should be found to deliver public services where there is hardly any kind of evaluation and innovative techniques and electronic means should be utilised to make them less expensive. “The cost of delivering that service is sometimes more expensive than the value of that service.” He said innovative solutions in the field of subsidies to minimise costs could save tens of billions of rupees to the country.