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A one-day breakdown in the system in the passport office creates chaotic scenes, with thousands of applicants for new travel documents refusing to leave the premises despite pleas that
they will be given priority the next day. Hundreds stayed overnight outside the gates.
Meanwhile, a Colombo medical laboratory checks a minimum of 500 people a day.
In a related development, the real estate market sees prices tumbling due to oversupply, with people in a hurry to sell their houses and lands.
The reason: There is a big rush to get the hell out of Sri Lanka before the economic situation gets any worse.
Thousands of skilled and educated people are leaving Sri Lanka because they feel the world around them is crashing. A senior military officer told me that of the 160 students who followed a private degree with his son in a Sri Lankan institute, all but two had left the country.
A modus operandi is finding a foreign university. Once an individual obtains admission to a western university, gets a student visa, and settles down in a foreign country, he or she, a few months later, can take the spouse and children as dependents. Soon the couple finds some odd jobs. If they are lucky, they will get higher salaries than what they got in Sri Lanka. In most western countries, children’s education is free. In some countries, health care is also free.
Others go to countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar on tourist visas and then look for jobs. Some succeed; some are fleeced.
Doctors and other professionals have sounded an alarm over the rate at which the country is losing its skilled workforce.
They warn that the day the country will be paralysed for want of skilled people is not that far. It was only the other day that the Sri Lanka Air Traffic Controllers Association chief pointed out that a large number of air traffic controllers had left the country in search of lucrative job opportunities abroad. If four more controllers leave, the system could come to a halt with the overburdened officers suffering from cumulative fatigue, he warned.
Explaining the concept of anomie, the Encyclopaedia of Brittanica says if a society impelled its members to acquire wealth yet offered inadequate means for them to do so, the strain would cause many people to violate norms
Call it brain drain and it is happening at a frightening rate. Call it betrayal because they care less for the country which spent the taxpayers’ money to make them what they are, giving them free education, free health care, subsidies, and other welfare benefits. True, one of the economic benefits of the brain drain is foreign remittances they will be sending, but it will happen only if they have any dependents left in Sri Lanka. But just by sending a few dollars to the mother country, can they repay the debt they owe to the country? How unpatriotic they are?
But this is not the time to talk about patriotism, ethics, norms, and principles. Sri Lanka is in what sociologists call anomie, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals. When anomie happens in an individual, it leads to suicide, as French sociologist Emile Durkheim who introduced the term, has said.
American sociologist Robert K. Merton applied Durkheim’s anomie concept to the social realities of societies where ‘getting ahead’, ‘making money’, and ‘material success’ were the norms. Merton could have also applied the theory to Sri Lanka’s society, which, despite its proud boast of being nurtured by four great religions, had been, since the economic liberalisation in 1977, highly materialistic and now crumbling. This is not to discount the spiritually inclined, but they are a minority.
Merton found that anomie or normlessness is at its severest in societies where people feel they are losing access to the means of achieving their personal goals. For them, goals are so important that if the institutionalized means—which are acceptable according to the standards of society—fail, illegitimate means might be used.
When the emphasis is on ends rather than on means, the crime rate goes up, the brain drain is triggered. This leads to anomie – the breakdown or a country-wide depression. And it is evident in Sri Lanka.
Explaining the concept of anomie, the Encyclopaedia of Brittanica says if a society impelled its members to acquire wealth yet offered inadequate means for them to do so, the strain would cause many people to violate norms. The only regulating agencies would be the desire for personal advantage and the fear of punishment. Social behaviour would thus become unpredictable. Merton defined a range of responses to anomie that varied from conformity to social innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and, finally, rebellion.
Sri Lanka witnessed a people-power rebellion last year when tens of thousands of people braved the law enforcement authorities and remained in Colombo and other key cities until they overthrew a president responsible for the crash of the economy and the disintegration of society.
As the pull towards a second uprising is gaining traction, the present government does not seem to be addressing the issue of anomie.
On the contrary, it takes measures that only worsen anomie. The recent tax hikes and the shocking rise in electricity tariffs on Wednesday show on the one hand an insensitive government’s inability to provide relief to the suffering people who are forced to undergo much hardship for no fault of theirs. On the other hand, the government is hell-bent on fulfilling the International Monetary Fund’s inhuman conditions that, in return, aggravate anomie in Sri Lanka. But the IMF does not seem to care. Altruism and the IMF are poles apart. So are the lifestyles of government leaders who are untouched by hardships and those of the people they claim to care about.
Our leaders past and present are responsible for Sri Lanka’s brain-drain-driven development deficiency. The 1956 Sinhala Only policy saw the English-educated citizens, crème de la crème, mostly the Burghers, leaving the country in hordes.
The racist and oppressive policies of the governments that followed triggered a separatist war and the second major wave of the brain drain ensued. And now the third brain drain is happening not only due to the economic mismanagement of the previous government that came to power whipping up ethnic hatred but also due to the failure of the present government to produce one positive sign to give hope that the turnaround is round the corner.
The result of these brain drains is the deceleration of the socioeconomic and political development of the country. When the country looks for skilled, innovative, and educated professionals to entrust them with the task of nation-building, there will be hardly any. This will further delay the recovery. This is why we need a government with a vision to address the socio-economic and political costs of the brain drain and take the right decisions in the interest of the nation instead of promoting self and party interests and aggravating anomie or socioeconomic disintegration.
