Daily News Editorial

Tackling poverty in post-pandemic development

Notwithstanding the continuing, if slow, spread of the COVID-29 disease in the country, the President is already looking ahead for the future of the nation. Alongside the management of the health threat itself, there has been considerable effort at contingency management of economic activity. Now the President has appointed a Presidential Task Force on Economic Revival and Poverty Eradication.

If society is to be sustained on a daily basis, then the economy has to be kept ticking over. The continuous string of directives and administrative initiatives emanating from the President’s office over the past three months of the evolving pandemic demonstrated the country’s operational dynamism in facing up to this disaster.

The carefully planned phasing out of the nationwide crippling lockdown is only now under way and, that, too has been suitably amended to slow down the opening up of public activity in the face of recent unexpected spikes in the infection rate. The number of infections stood at 338 yesterday but this is expected to slowly rise further as expanded testing detects more positive cases.

While beefing up the proactive testing programme is the immediate pre-occupation, the President has now appointed a Presidential Task Force to plan for overall economic recovery and tackling the expected upturn in poverty. The Task Force comprises some thirty top officials and experts as well as respected private sector magnates.

The President has rightly included ‘poverty eradication’ in the subject matters to be addressed by the Task Force because the severe socio-economic dislocation being caused by the pandemic is expected to include income loss affecting whole social layers. The on-going economic shutdown has already affected employment which in turn means loss of income.

Unlike the rich countries with their billions and even trillions in financial reserves, Sri Lanka is a developing country that has been burdened with debt in its struggle to reach its current standard of economic and social life. We do not have reserves to draw on and so there will be a socio-economic pinch that needs much innovation and public-private partnership and astute management of the national economy in the coming months.

The nation will now look to this new Task Force to begin to plot our post-pandemic economic course.

Human violence in the Wild

The 25-year-old Wildlife Officer who died when shot at by intercepted poachers in the Gal Oya National Park on Wednesday night is not the first human Sri Lankan to sacrifice his life to protect the wildlife on our island home.

And, judging by the continued illegal preying on of our wild animals to feed human desires despite the visible dying away off of some of our most loved creatures, there may be other brave young Wildlife Officers sacrificing their lives in the future as well.

Our 65,610-square-kilometre island is blessed by one of the world’s highest bio-diversities and bio-densities. We not only have an extremely varied range of flora and fauna but all these numerous species of nature are packed into a small land area. And the physical area of animal habitat is getting smaller literally by the day due to human expansionism.

Humans are not only busily reducing the living space for the other creatures that inhabit this island with us, but also they are busy actively hunting them down. Our area of forest cover has dwindled from over 50 per cent of land area two hundred years ago to just 29 per cent at present with the primeval tree cover comprising a mere 9 per cent.

No wonder that various creatures of our wilderness are constantly spilling over in to human settlement and livelihood areas! Even as our beloved elephants have become a most endangered species we yet describe their predicament as a “human-elephant conflict”. The correct perspective should be ‘human genocide of elephants’ (and other threatened species).

This is why the Department of Wild Life Conservation plays an important role. Already an important element of our tourism attraction, in the post-pandemic period, we will need to rely even more on our wildlife as well as our natural landscapes as we look to tourism as one of the main strategic tracks for economic recovery.

It is hoped that not only will the killers of a State officer on duty be prosecuted and severely punished, but also that the authorities investigate and interdict the consumers and markets that stand to benefit from this poaching of our wildlife. New and growing global market demand includes genome and DNA industries for medical and industrial purposes as well as exotic food interests and rare fauna and flora interests.

Given the increasing importance of our (dwindling) natural habitat, it is time that the Wildlife Department is given more legal teeth as well as more human and technical resources to protect our flora and fauna. Such new technology as remote-controlled surveillance drones can be deployed to help our Wildlife rangers who are also an ‘endangered species’.

The Island Editorial

Animals enjoying freedom

Man has been put in his place, at long last. While humans are having lockdown blues, which are not likely to go away anytime soon, animals which were in hiding for fear of cruel bipeds are now enjoying unbridled freedom, which they richly deserve.

A report we publish, today, says Albania’s pink flamingos and curly pelicans are flourishing in lagoons, thanks to Covid-19, which has forced humans, who pollute water and air, and disturb the world, to remain indoors. Animals have been sighted even in cities in some parts of the world. We have recently seen heartwarming pictures of a gaze of raccoons scurrying about, in the Central Park, New York, a herd of sika deer in Nara, Japan, a sounder of pigs in Haifa, Israel, a paddling of mallards in Paris, a tribe of mountain goats in the Welsh town of Llandudno, a peacock in Dubai and a herd of fallow deer in East London.

Whoever would have thought, a few moons ago, such rare, pleasing sights would ever be possible? The curious critters, straying into the newly opened-up terrain, must be feeling sorry for the bipeds inhabiting the concrete jungles.

Humans get depressed when they have to stay at home, together with their loved ones, for a few weeks. Has anyone ever paused to think how depressed the dumb animals, forcibly removed from their families and natural habitats, and kept in zoos, are? We fought quite a battle, about a decade ago, to prevent a baby elephant from being separated from his mother, in Pinnawala, and donated to a temple. Sadly, our efforts failed.

Some people are so depressed due to being confined to their own homes that they have turned to alienists to get over their blues, we are told. But nobody give a tinker’s cuss about the animals kept in prisons that are zoos.

Freedom that raccoons are enjoying in the Central Park, New York, reminds us of the poor Central Park Five—a group of schoolboys including four Black Americans and a Latino—wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman and incarcerated, 30 years ago. Donald Trump called for implementing the death sentence by way of deterrent punishment, but the man who committed the crime confessed, years later, and the youth had to be exonerated. By that time, they had served sentences, ranging from six to 13 years. Last year, when the issue was raised again, President Trump refused to tender an apology!

Besides being slaughtered and incarcerated for commercial purposes, animals are subjected to various other forms of cruelty. In this country, which is said to be home to several great religions, elephants are made to undergo untold suffering in the name of jumbo safaris. Hakkapatas (improvised explosive devices concealed in fruits, etc.) cause elephants to suffer agonising deaths. In some other countries, dogs are eaten or made to take part in races. The same goes for horses, camels, etc. In Scandinavia, dolphins are slaughtered, in their hundreds, by boys upon reaching ‘manhood’. Some nations are notorious for foxhunting, which Oscar Wilde rightly described, though a character in one of his plays, as ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’.

There are many other ways in which humans inflict suffering on poor animals. It looks as if the retribution had finally come in the form of a highly contagious zoonosis, which has snuffed out many lives and caused humans to be incarcerated in their own homes. The dreadful coronavirus has stood everything manmade on its head and instilled into humans the fear of death in a far more effective way than terrorism. Will they stop deriving pleasure from inflicting suffering on animals?

Daily Mirror Editorial

Home education during a crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic poses many questions regarding school education. One is why should students return to school at all if technology was used effectively in providing knowledge during this break taken from education inside an institution?

Parents will vouch for the fact that students enjoyed the use of learning devices like laptops and smart phones in the task of down loading tutorials sent to them by their school teachers.

One of the advantages of this method of providing education, during this pandemic, is that the students can pick the time of learning. They (Students) are in a way ‘bosses’ and can set their time for education. But education experts warn that still parents must have some control over their children in the use of learning devices due to the presence of internet use. 

These experts also have provided guidelines for parents for the task of supervising their children in ‘home education’.

Parents have been told to make children have a set time to get up and go to sleep. They must also ensure children have regular meal times. These experts also recommend regular breaks during education and allow or create time for children to engage in physical activities. 

We can take a cue from the planting community in the tea estates. Most planters in these tea estates are alone and away from their families; hence there is a tendency for them to go ‘wild’. Most ‘trainee managers’ in the tea planting industry have been advised to dress for meal time when they are alone in the manager’s bungalow. This is because a person with authority when alone can develop very unhealthy or unbecoming habits. The dressing up during meal time is a reminder to these planters, both rookies and veterans, that discipline is as important as the air one breathes. Students locked down at homes during this pandemic must follow this habit of planters in maintaining discipline during this crisis.

There are enough of stories about some of our own parliamentarians being given home education. Some of the most erudite ladies in the Sri Lankan society were home educated. 

But then we must return to the question why our present ‘home educated generation of students’ must return to school when the coronavirus is eliminated. 

The present generation must be taught several old lessons here: The school is not a place where our learning is restricted to the use of books. It is a place where we learn to share and care and be sensitive to the needs of others. It is a place where cultured children are exposed to others from all walks of life. It is also the place where the less aggressive ones learn to survive among the aggressive and less ambitious ones learn to raise the bar or hence be left out of the race. ‘School’ is a once in a lifetime period and being with other children and getting that community feeling is one vital ingredient in recipe that produces an all-round student.

The COVID-19 pandemic made the educational authorities accelerate the development of the online learning process. This crisis will push the educational authorities to demand more from technology experts and the latter will in return have to sweat to upgrade their devices. As much as the internet is used these days to educate children it would be a miss if no mention is made of the Government’s efforts to use state television and provide an education to students studying for the O’Level and A’Level examinations. 

Home education using technology opened the eyes of school teachers to new dimensions in education. But this system of learning also underscored the fact that the life lessons learned inside the boundaries of the school can never be offered in the process called home education, even if the best of technology is used.