Recently I saw advertisements in English and Sinhala newspapers requesting proposals for the budgrt-2017 from the citizens. This practice started sometime back and then the finance minister at that time made use of the opportunity to say some proposals were from the public when they were not in favour of general public. I believe during the past they may not have had taken any of citizen ideas, instead may have had twisted for the government’s benefit.
When a similar advertisement appeared for the first time, I also submitted a proposal which was personally praised by the Director of Fiscal/policy/Planning at that time. He telephoned me to personally thank for the effort I took to originate such a valuable proposal. Further he said even though the proposal was a gold mine to the treasury as I said, finance minister also would not be able to implement it because it needs still higher authority approval.
After few days there was another advertisement with more than hundred people’s names and addresses saying selected proposals originators for considerations. My name also was there, but it had not been considered. Some people told me even though their names were appeared in that list, their proposals were not considered as my one.
In this scenario I would like to suggest that the Finance Ministry should publish all the proposals or the selected ones in the Finance Ministry website, and also show the considered proposals. In this way the Finance Ministry can win the confidence of the general public and there would be no chances to say the proposals which would be a burden to the general public are from us.
W. Jayawardena De Silva, Nawala
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