Sri Lanka It's Happening

January 28, 2005

People who work for the government of Sri Lanka are a pampered lot. Each department is hugely overstaffed and that means they rarely have to do any work, they can simply pass the buck to someone else. The end result is that no work get's done.

A public servant can take 42 days of paid leave. (yes 42 days). In most places they don't have to work on saturdays. Since there are only 53 weeks in each year and they work only 5 days a week, they are supposed to work only on 265 days each year. When you substract the 42 holidays that leaves 223.

Then there are 12 or 13 full moon days each year, a day of religious significance for buddhists and therefor a holiday, at least 10 of these will fall on a weekday so that leaves only 213 days of work for public servants.

Then there a loads of other holidays including, christian, hindu and moslem holidays. THen there is the hindu/sinhala new year (2 days). How can we forget independence day or the national heroes day? It would be safe to substract 13 more days of work and say a public servant works only 200 days each year.

They go on strike at the slightest excuse and always demand higher wages even though many of them do not do any work at all. Now some of them, are to recieve a windfall; public servants from the tsunami effected areas are to have their loans waived off. wow.

Posted by raditha at January 28, 2005 1:04 PM