Justice will be meted out immediately to any person duped by bribery and corruption. A senior Minister said a ministerial level decision has been taken in this regard.
Responding to public questions at a ‘Meet the Minister’ forum in Colombo last week, he said corruption has been zeroed at ministerial level leaving no stone unturned for any official to be involved in shady deals.
“We have received a mandate to eliminate corruption and we will do our utmost to fulfill the pledge to rid the country of bribery and corruption,” Minister of Industries and Entrepreneurship Development Sunil Handunnetti said.
Many questions on overcoming bureaucratic hurdles, lethargy and corruption were thrown at the Minister and his Deputy Chathuranga Abeysinghe who co-chaired the meeting organised by the National Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka.
The GovPay payment app has helped minimise corruption which is rampant in the public and private sector to a very great extent, the Minister said.
Corruption at all levels of administration has been a stumbling block to bridge the rich-poor gap that has existed for ages, even leading to social unrest and partly the reason for a 30-year conflict in the country.
According to Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, Sri Lanka scored 32 on a scale from 0 (‘highly corrupt’) to 100 (‘very clean’). Sri Lanka’s score has declined every year since the 2020 Index where it scored 38.
However, the incumbent regime which is hell bent on rooting out corruption from society acknowledge that it has not yet able to check corruption existing at bureaucratic level.
Officials of leading revenue generating bodies of the country are constantly being alleged of having their palms greased, depriving revenue to State coffers.
The high-profile fraud involving over 200 luxury vehicles imported bypassing Custom duties that resulted in the state incurring a massive loss is a case in point.
However, the incumbent regime must be lauded for its focus on creating an entrepreneurial culture by introducing entrepreneurship as a subject to the mainstream education syllabus from next year. “We will introduce ‘Entrepreneurship’ as a subject to the Grade Nine syllabus from next year,” Minister Handunnetti said.
The Industries Ministry will also free land in the North, the East and the South to create manufacturing and export processing zones”, he said.
According to the Minister, plans are in place to increase land from around 5,000 acres to 20,000 acres for industrial work in the country.
