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Madame selfless, reliable, transparent and uncorrupt
By Marisa de Silva
Honesty, transparency and being uncorrupt, were some of the qualities for which President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga received the 'Leader with Sri Lankan Values' award, at the first ever National Icon Awards (NIA), organised by the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing (SLIM).

In addition to these key values, people had taken values such as selflessness, reliability and sincerity into consideration - values apparently appreciated by the Sri Lankan people, said immediate past President, SLIM and NIA Chairman Nalin Attygalle.

"The unique aspect of this awards ceremony is that all the award winners are decided on research based opinion polls, conducted island-wide, across a substantial cross section (urban, rural and estate communities) of society" he said. The North and East were excluded from the opinion poll.

SLIM hired TNS Lanka (Pvt) Ltd., an independent market information company, to conduct the island wide research, tabulate the data and return the final result to SLIM. As it was a poll-based event there was no necessity for the submission of applications or nominations.

The polls were conducted throughout the island interviewing 2610 respondents, between the ages of eight and sixty-five, said Associate Vice President, TNS Lanka, Rajesh Kumar. TNS Lanka decided on the number of samples per area, in proportion to the respective populations of the identified area, he said.

Once the survey was fully completed, the research firm also carried out a physical re-check on 32% of the samples, by re-visiting some of those who responded and repeating the questions to check if the answers were consistent. Finally, all the data tabulated by TNS Lanka, was audited by SJMS Associates.

All those who responded were asked two basic questions, on brand awareness and preference. No prompting was done or a list provided, Mr. Kumar said. Thereafter, the data was processed utilizing a specific formula devised by the company, which decided the overall winner. With regards to the category 'Leader with Sri Lankan Values' though, the questions had differed slightly.

Those interviewed had been asked to list what they consider to be important values in a leader. The interviewee was then asked whom he/she considered as having these values best. Once the data was collected, it was processed via a similar formula utilized by TNS Lanka.

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