“How many Sinhala word processors and font-drivers have been written by people with a B.Sc. in an IT related field? I bet maybe not even one! Doctors, Mathematicians, Social Scientists and even school-dropouts who had fallen in love with computers, yes! But I guess, not many formally IT qualified people! In fact, the very first author of a Sinhala Word processor to whom I was introduced (called Mahanama) cheerfully admitted to being an A Level dropout before taking to computers!”___________________________________________
by Priyanthi Wickramasuriya
(March 02, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Today, virtually every Sri Lankan student studying at a state university here gets the Mahapola Grant. Whether hailing from a rich or poor family, they get it So much so, that it had become a right. A right not only to receive it, but periodically demand an increase to what they had hitherto received - sometimes maybe with arrears! And in return, they don’t undertake to do even such necessary (but unfulfilled) conditions such as wildcat strikes, clashes with one another, vandalising university property or even to refrain from ‘ragging’ new entrants (freshers)!
They dress a lot better than we managed to during our undergraduate days, dependent as we were on our parents; and have more money to fling about! Go to the ‘Kiri Hala’ (Milk Bar) at our University (Kelaniya) during session time, and you will see a whole crowd of students sitting on the parapet walls, licking yoghurt spoons or with a tiny pot of curd and treacle in hand, or holding onto an ice-choc. or you might see them at the canteen, sipping a ‘cola’. Just count the number of students using a cellular-phone (a ‘mobile’) at one time. It’s not only the capital cost of the latter, but the bills! Usually much more expensive than that of Telecom!
In our days, the only refreshment available (other than lunch packets and may be ‘rolls’ of dubious quality) was a cup of tea (sometimes ‘kahata’ only) at the Polwatta Canteen. Most had never seen a ‘phone till they had stepped inside a campus department office. And even that would have been the Intercom! Even in 1986, the whole of the Science Faculty, I think had only two real ‘phones. one in the Faculty Office, and the other at the nascent Computer Centre!
It is not that I am against progress or being something of an old sour-grapes! But what happens when our undergraduate finally graduates, and is thrust upon the real world to make a living? often ill-equipped in terms of having a good command of English, IT literate, having a real-understanding of what he had studied (having more often than not done well in exams or even just scraped through by sheer memorisation) or capable of writing a decent report even in his mother tongue (Sinhala or Tamil), he waits for a plum job to fall into his lap. A job that pays even 5-6 thousand at the start is not for him! Nor one that entails a lot of walking or standingup, or soiling one’s hands with manual-work, commerce or chemicals! Even teaching is accepted only as a last resort. And then they start writing letters to the Sinhala papers demanding that they be paid more than the trained teachers, since they are ‘better-qualified’!
And with an expanding population of youth and under-forties, and a shrinking economy, the situation is becoming progressively worse! No wonder that there’s massive unemployment and what is perceived as underemployment among today’s so-called ‘educated youth’, particularly graduates and occasionally those with postgraduate qualifications!
What’s the remedy?
In other countries, not even postgraduate students but undergraduates (indeed much more as they have no savings of their own) do small jobs in their spare-time and during the vacation. Jobs such as working part-time in eating establishments, department-stores, etc. or going fruit-picking working in sugar-cane plantations, farms, canneries, etc. or felling logs is not uncommon. President Abraham Lincoln famously worked as a timber-jack in a logging camp during vacation time to pay his law-school fees, as what his step-mother had scrimped and saved was only enough for the very first term of the very first year!
Go to any Mac-Donald’s outlet in England (or USA) during a weekend, and you will see it being manned entirely by kids and teenagers wanting to earn a little pocketmoney! (In any case Mac- Donald’s symbolised only cheap food or fast food, and not good food!) Teenagers will mow an elderly neighbour’s lawn or baby-sit for a young couple wanting to spend some time together on their own, in return for a small monetary payment. It’s not considered infra-dig for either them or their parents to do so. And they might have hobbies such as carpentry, photography or watch repairing which might in turn bring in them a little extra money. And a person might hold 2 or 3 jobs! For instance, a bank-clerk might give violin lessons in some of his evenings. Or an office - worker might work as a garage-hand or petrol-shed attendant in the evening. or a ledger-clerk might arrive an hour early to mop the office floor, for which she might be paid extra! Or a housewife might work as a store-clerk part-time, while her husband was looking after the kids. Or they might one or both work from home! Take sewing-orders, catering-orders, typing, IT related work or free-lance writing to name but a few instances! Newly migrated Indians in Britain are said to be particularly adept at this!
Even without having got more and more into debt, coupled with allowing free imports of rice and foodstuffs which can easily be produced here (and which in fact were grown/made here), we would still have got into this morass, because of our wrong attitude to education. Education is to broaden one’s mind and spirit, and give an enhanced view of opportunities available (or missed), and not as a passport to obtaining a government sinecure or being a bureaucrat entangled in the R&R-s of red tape, or being a greedy scheming crooked politician! It is not an automatic pathway to "better oneself than one’s parents" nor a certificate guaranteeing that one’s IQ is above the rest of the hoi polloi!
And giving the Mahapola Scholarships (schols really no longer) has only exacerbated the problem. Sure, Minister Lalith Athulathmudali might have had a vision! A vision of poor students free from threat of hunger, and in addition having means to purchase books to further their studies and open vistas hitherto un-open to their minds. But go among the students, and see how many has read even so much as one book lately not directly connected with his course of study or who has opened a newspaper with an intent other than looking for various advertisements?
Go to the library near exam time, and you will see students totally engrossed in their study notes or occasionally engaged in conversation among themselves or (a couple) holding hands or gazing into each other’s eyes. If you see even 10 per cent of them actually browsing among the books or magazines, you can count yourself lucky. Give them an assignment to do, to find out and write on some topic, 10-to-1, they will trawl the Net and download some stuff and do a copy-and-paste into Word (maybe from several sources) and hand-it-in! Even some lecture notes are prepared this way, I suspect, without acknowledging the original source, but rather taking the credit wholly to oneself. How many books do students possess, other than exam-passing manuals? In fact, it might be interesting to find out how many books some (though definitely not all) lecturers have on their bookshelves - even if borrowed from the library, unless it is to sequester it and give notes wholesale out of them or set exam papers from worked examples.
And of the programmers and computer personnel produced by our universities and IT tutories, how many can do original work? For instance, if his computer project was a ‘Database one’, would he be able to do some data analysing or implementation of a mathematical algorithm? In fact, does he know the difference between a relational DBMS and a CODASYL Network) one? Can he or she even fully normalise a database or capture a real-life system into a computer package in toto? Even upto say, 90%? 70%? 40% even? Most so-called database systems I have seen here are like patchwork quilts, rarely coming upto the standard of an even moderately good Information System! Programmers are harried into producing ‘something’ at short notice, resulting in poor design complemented with shoddy loose code that requires a lot of maintaining. With what result? The programmers are kept working round the clock, ‘improving the program’ and writing ‘new small programs’ to cope with each and every change in the system environment. Changes which should have been anticipated long ago! And some of those program interfaces are not exactly userfriendly! Worse still, not rigorously tested! Textbooks say, that even after full debugging, a large package should be tested on live data, with the manual system still being run parallely for several minor cycles that encompass at least one major cycle (usually an year or in the case of an exam related one, a full cycle ranging from inception of classes/application-forms till the final result (e.g. B. Sc.) is released. But try doing it here! I myself learnt a bitter lesson long ago, in connection with devising a system for the university payroll. I have often wondered, whether with particular programs what is generated as output are at least 80-90% correct!
How many Sinhala word processors and font-drivers have been written by people with a B.Sc. in an IT related field? I bet maybe not even one! Doctors, Mathematicians, Social Scientists and even school-dropouts who had fallen in love with computers, yes! But I guess, not many formally IT qualified people! In fact, the very first author of a Sinhala Word processor to whom I was introduced (called Mahanama) cheerfully admitted to being an A Level dropout before taking to computers! But people whose first degree is an IT related one, what about them? Are we teaching IT right, if you forgive the pun? And this now seems to apply to most courses taught at university level in Sri Lanka today. The vast majority of students study only to pass exams, not learn. Thus there’s sometimes only rote-learning to the extent of positive cramming, without any real understanding. Nor any expectation of ever gaining any deep understanding of their subject! So much midnight oil (okay electricity) burnt in vain!
Let Chandrika keep the Lotteries to herself, and not give a single cent extra to Mahapola. In fact, the money so disbursed might serve a better purpose if used to subsidise fertiliser for farmers (though encouragement of using organic manure more would be a better idea both cost-wise and yield-wise and arresting further degradation of the soil) or as loans for starting small self- employment projects - perhaps modelled on the Grameen Bank concept borrowed from Bangladesh. In Cuba, it is said, it was the practice for high-school and college students to spend sometime working in sugarcane plantations or teaching literacy skills in villages. Perhaps a similar scheme could be tried out here. As I said, the Mahapola Scheme had failed its objective. The money could be used much better elsewhere - generating real productivity and expanding the economy in real terms and not through increased costs and prices!
Reserve a small amount for needy students to borrow - either to feed and clothe themselves, buy books or other course related necessities like stethoscopes, computers (for their IT-related project or to type their assignments and theses) on the full understanding that once secured of a job or means through self-employment they will pay it back within 5-10 years time. Court action should be taken against defaulters.
Students should be encouraged to invest their money in a PC rather than a mobile ‘phone, unless the latter are to be integrated into a small business venture. PCs are not that expensive. At current rates both a computer and a small printer together can be secured for less than 50,000 rupees. If buying second-hand, the cost might be very much less. And a computer is a useful acquisition, whose lifespan should extend much further than the student’s undergraduate days, if properly used! Especially since most people need it only for word-processing, and in any case it can be upgraded part by part - more RAM, a larger capacity hard disk or a newer O/S - since almost each and every PC now up and running in the country is equipped with a DVD/CD drive.) This way, Mahapola would become a Great Bargaining Fair for the country in real terms, a commercial exchange and a hub for generating productivity related activity, and not the millstone round the country’s neck it is now.
By writing all this, I guess, I’d be unpopular both with the JVP and the student activists if not the entire populace at the University of Kelaniya. But if the JVP or anybody else is serious about developing our country and freeing ourselves eventually from the stranglehold of foreign lending institutions, this is the way to go!
I’ll only add, please impose import tariffs at least during peak production times, so that our farmers and other producers can compete on a level playing field. Don’t ban imports. Just slap on reasonable import tariffs, so that the imported items will be a bit more expensive. And enforce quality control, not so that the small producer will be weighted down by unbearable capital costs incurred by establishing state-of-the-art testing laboratories, but rather that the local consumer gets a fair deal -and not just any old shoddy product!
Encourage locals to go local! To buy local and use local raw-material as far as possible!
Why allow rice imports at all during the height of the Maha season? If a rice deficit for the year is expected, it must be rectified in a manner not to hurt the local farmer. The same goes for dhal (parippu), potatoes and chillies, to mention but a few. The CWE outlets need not be open 24 hours a day- certainly not at midnight, unless it happen to be the pharmaceuticals section, but should take good care of the local producer as well as the local consumer. And that goes to each and every state institution, and each and every state employee - including MPs and ministers! That’s what promoting the Mahapola concept should come to mean!
Failing all this, the Mahapola scheme will be merely yet another failed concept, a pipedream that simply faded with time, a useless brainwave that failed to meet its objectives, a white elephant tethered in the country’s backyard!
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