Kavantissa'a Election Diary

"I will do what I say, and will say what I do," says Ranil Wickremesinghe often. It is election time, so he has a lot to say and we won't begrudge the man a single word. In fact the more he says the better it is. We had a lot of fun with Pera-Kum and the Pas-dun after all.

Ranil, who believes that the market is the best arbiter, distributor and determinant of all things, seems to have turned over a new leaf.

Well, it is an old leaf, and it is called porondu deshapalanaya. While his ardent fans, advisors and beneficiaries are championing him as the Free Market Guru of Sri Lanka, Ranil is going around talking welfare to all and sundry. Sounds a bit jaded I must say.

Take the Free Milk promise for example. He has promised a free glass of milk every day for all children under five years of age. He doesn't say how he is going to do it, but there are certain delivery problems and other consequences I am pretty sure he has not considered.

What happens on the ground? Let us start from the delivery end of the logistics.

Since there are children all over the country, in every province, every district, every DS area and every GN Division, Wickremesinghe will have to set up a milk bar in each and every village in rural areas and every street corner in the more urbanised parts of the country.

Since we don't produce locally a volume of milk sufficient to feed the nation's children, he has got to up production in leaps and bounds or else have a facility (or many) that can turn powdered milk into liquid form in massive quantities.

How about transporting the milk? Imagine the number of vehicles needed to do this? And every day too! Add to all this the number of drivers, cleaners and milk bar attendants and the unemployment problem could be halved!

Ranil is supposed to be a good manager, a visharada on matters economic. The milk glass issue debunks all that pretty comprehensively, I believe. If this country had the infrastructure to give a glass of milk to every child under five years of age, and had the money to provide it free, then we wouldn't have worried who won the election.

Let us look at it from the other side of the equation. If all women were housewives and all families had only one child under the age of five, then of course it is possible for these mothers to take their babies to the kiri hala every morning for their daily glass of milk, although this might very well mess up their morning schedule of cooking and cleaning.

The truth, however, is that not all women are housewives and not all households contain single-child families.

Therefore, in order for Ranil's plan to work, the mother and the father would have to take turns at trudging with the little one (who knows what distance!) for the free glass of milk, trudge all the way back and then go about their business.

He does not understand the most basic things about planning. He must have had an ayah or appu bringing him milk when he was a child, but that's a privilege that millions of children in our country don't have.

All he had to do was say that he will go for a policy of price control! But that wouldn't sit well with the free market wallahs he hob-nobs with, would it ? Most serious, he has absolutely the greatest disdain for the intelligence of the common man.