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Sri Lanka Civil Service
The civil service in Sri Lanka was established during the
colonial period and in the late 1980s continued to operate in
accordance with well-established British precedents. It was
hierarchical in structure. At the apex of the hierarchy was a
well-defined elite, the Sri Lanka Administrative Service, which
was composed of talented men and women chosen by competitive
examination. They were well-educated generalists, expected to
take a broad perspective in their work in contrast to specialist
personnel operating on the lower ranks of the hierarchy. They
enjoyed tremendous prestige. Because government employment on
practically all levels offered economic security as well as
status, competition for civil service and other government
positions remained intense. One of the most important sources of
Tamil disaffection from the Sinhalese-dominated political system
has been their perception that government service opportunities
for members of their community were decreasing. This view is
borne out by statistics: in the administrative service, the
number of Tamil officeholders declined from 11.1 percent of the
total during the 1970-77 period to only 5.7 percent during the
1978-81 period. Spokesmen for the Sinhalese majority have
asserted that the British traditionally favored the employment of
Tamils over Sinhalese in the colonial bureaucracy and that the
declining Tamil percentages reflected an equitable redressing of
the balance. The percentage during 1978-81, however, was
substantially lower than Sri Lankan Tamils' percentage of the
total population (12.6 percent in 1985).
Especially since the early 1970s, the civil service has been
subject to intense political pressures. Under the British-style
1946 constitution, the highest-ranking appointed officials in the
government were the secretaries attached to each ministry. But
after the adoption of the 1972 constitution, secretaries have
been political appointees. This change and the dynamics of
patron-client politics have compromised both the bureaucracy's
claim of political neutrality and the quality of its staff. The
power of patronage means that each member of Parliament has jobs,
ranging from professional positions like school teachers or
engineers, to clerkships and menial labor, which the members can
distribute freely to followers. The eclipse of Tamil influence in
Parliament has meant that such benefits were not generally
available to the Tamil community.
In the late 1980s, about 25 percent of all employment in Sri
Lanka was in the public sector. In addition to the civil service,
this proportion included the police, the armed forces, and public
corporations, which continued to dominate the economy despite
Jayewardene's liberalization policies since 1977
(see Sri Lanka - Nature of the Economy
, ch. 3).
Data as of October 1988
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