It has been rumored in the recent past that the Sri Lankan public service is at an unbearable level. The government has recently stated that most of the country’s revenue is spent on public service salaries.
This was also discussed in Parliament today (13). That was by the Minister of Finance. Minister of Finance Basil Rajapaksa stated that the public service has expanded beyond the reach of the country. It is no longer possible to provide benefits to the public service.
The public service has become a burden to the country and giving more relief to the public service means that money has to be obtained from the people. As a result, it will not be possible to spend public money on public service for another year, the Finance Minister said.
He pointed out that although the government did not increase the salaries of public servants, it did provide them with non-financial relief. At the time of independence, there was only one public servant out of 118 in the country. But now there is one public servant for every 13 people in the country.
Many of these public servants get married after a while. Their children enter universities and enter higher education when these public servants retire. This is a big problem for them. For this reason, we have raised the retirement age of public servants by 10 years.
Now when it is increased from 55 to 65 years, they get an economic advantage from it. We also need employees who have experience in the public service. In the future, steps will be taken to provide new jobs in proportion to the number of public servants retiring annually, ”he added.