Transport Ministry incompetence costs Treasury Rs. 1 billion

By Ranjith Jayasundera

Amidst all the government's mind-boggling wastage of public funds, there is a lot of leeway for 'smaller' amounts of wastage and mischievous activity to slip under the radar.

With Mihin Lanka having lost Rs.3 billion in under a year, only to be outdone by SriLankan Airlines losing Rs.5.7 billion within just three months of Emirates' abdication of management, one would have thought that there was a limit to the government's tenacity for burning Treasury cash.

But the twin revelations in parliament that the SAARC Summit was costing Rs.5.1 billion rupees (two billion for the police, two more for fancy vehicles and one for other stuff) and that the Foreign Ministry has evaporated its Rs.6 billion rupee annual budget in just six months, made it clear that this is an administration all about spending, at any cost.

This callous attitude is today on display at the Transport Ministry, where moves are afoot to purchase equipment for the Railways Department and the Sri Lanka Transport Board (SLTB) for a total cost of over Rs.1 billion.

Steel against concrete

The Railways Department is procuring steel 'sleepers' for its railway tracks at a total cost of US$ 6.4 million. Sleepers are the bars laid perpendicular to a rail line atop which the actual rail track is placed. Most railway lines in Sri Lanka use sleepers made out of relatively cheap timber, or sturdier, but far heavier, concrete.

Partly due to a national timber shortage, but more due to some inexplicable allergy to widely used (and locally manufactured) concrete sleepers, the Transport Ministry has chosen to tender for steel sleepers to be imported, instead of making do with cheaper Sri Lankan made sleepers.

The Ministry tender for 50,000 steel sleepers received two responses, one of which was unfit even for consideration, resulting in the tender being awarded to the only other bidder, who was another foreign manufacturer, keeping a 1% (US$61,830) commission for the local agent.

Should concrete or wooden sleepers been purchased instead, the total cost of the materials could have been cut by as much as half, to a modest US$3 million. More than the cost saving, what is inexplicable is that the Ministry chose to go against the advice of several Railways Department engineers in choosing steel over other materials.

"We know that steel has been harder to maintain," a senior engineer told The Sunday Leader on condition of anonymity. "We used to have facilities to manufacture concrete sleepers within the department, but these are now run down. The problem with steel sleepers is that unlike the wooden ones they don't absorb impact shock, and instead pass the whole shock on to the locomotive. This will be a huge drain on our loco maintenance costs."

"It is also difficult to prevent the steel sleepers from rusting, and most countries with rails like ours only use them on a temporary basis. For example it is impossible to safely run trains at high speeds over steel sleepers," a retired Railway Department mechanical engineer said.

Colossal waste

Transport Minister Dulles Alahapperuma has already obtained cabinet approval for the purchase, and is thus set to waste US$6,000,000 in preciously scarce foreign exchange on an ill-suited purchase of materials that could have been sourced locally.

The Railways Department was recently plagued by a controversy involving its General Manager, Dr. Lalithsiri Gunaruwan, who along with a senior engineer was accused of trying to sway the outcome of a multi-billion rupee tender for the purchase of 15 locomotives, on the basis of a mid-evaluation attempt to tweak the maximum weight allowed for an individual locomotive on the tracks.

It is little wonder that confusion reigns in the Railways Department with regard to safety specifications if the Ministry's decision makers make procurements of track equipment against the advice of the department's senior engineers.

Forbidden to speak

Repeated attempts to contact Dr. Gunaruwan failed as his officials explained that he was extremely busy with meetings. Other railway officials apart from the department's general manager have been forbidden by the government to speak to the media - in the wake of The Sunday Leader's expose on the locomotive tender - and thus none were willing to speak to The Sunday Leader on the record.

The Ministry has also been forced, by way of a dilapidated fleet of government owned buses, to purchase 300 brand new buses from India at a total cost of nearly Rs.340 million, in order to ply a network of new rural routes that the SLTB and National Transport Commission (NTC) are trying to establish.

SLTB Chairman, Tudor Dayaratne told The Sunday Leader that the Transport Board has around 9,000 buses in its fleet of which 5,000 are operated everyday. He was not in a position to comment on how many of the remaining 4,000 buses are in a state of disrepair and how many serve no purpose other than having to be scrapped at some later date.

Impotent fleet

An official familiar with the government's transport policy explained that this impotent fleet is a "typical public sector problem." He said that in the private sector, when a bus owner notices that his vehicle needs repairs, he would attend to it the very next day and if necessary sell the vehicle off to cut his losses.

"But in the state sector what happens is that there is no proper maintenance arrangement. Only when a bus will not even start and has to be scrapped does it get put aside, so these vehicles never last more than about eight years because of this."

Thus it is due to yet more negligence and inefficiency that perfectly good vehicles are left to ruin and new ones have to be imported at a high cost to the public, in order to fulfil the critical need of expanding the availability of public transport in rural areas.

The proceedings of the bus tender itself are a little mysterious. The National Procurement Guidelines state in Section 2.5.1 (a) that government procurement committees are bound to "ensuring that the funds are available for the procurement action under consideration." The committees are thus bound to ensure that there is enough money available to award the tender in full to the winning bidder.

This measure is primarily used to prevent corruption; so that a procuring agency cannot, upon completion of a tender, should it have not been awarded to their favourite party, decide that there are "insufficient funds" and scrap the tender for the benefit of a chosen party.

Yet for the bus tender, which the Cabinet Appointed Procurement Committee (CAPC) recommended be awarded jointly to two parties, the CAPC proposed that "in case of limited allocation of funds, it should be awarded on pro-rate basis (2:1)."

This CAPC recommendation was echoed by Minister Dulles Alahapperuma in his Cabinet Memorandum MT/49/2008 despite the procurement guidelines making clear that a tender should not be called unless adequate funds are available to complete the procurement.

Scraping the bottom

Thus the Ministry has now completed two tenders, in which a little foresight and care could have saved the country several hundred million rupees. To put this in perspective, the government's "clean up Colombo for SAARC" programme cost under Rs. 300 million, which means the saving on these purchases alone would have been enough to do up even more of Colombo's roads.

It is little wonder that the government is scraping the bottom of the Treasury barrel for the odd coin, given the callousness with which it is spending public money. It is also unlikely that their behaviour will change before virtual bankruptcy grinds the country to a standstill.

'Users have no need to panic' - TRC

Rohan Samarajeewa and Gotabaya Rajapakse

Securing mobile telephony

By Ruan Pethiyagoda

An announcement by the TRC of new regulations to help positively identify mobile phone users has caused a sense of panic amongst the public that the regulating body feels is unwarranted

The new regulations, widely publicised in the media, are intended to solve one of the biggest problems plaguing mobile operators: the inability to know for certain who is using the mobile phone numbers issued by them.

The press release issued by the government on Saturday, July 12, stated that mobile users would be required to carry with them "the certificate issued by the relevant mobile operator" verifying that they are the registered owner of the phone's SIM card. According to the release, the Defence Ministry was to "issue directions" to the police, armed forces and "other security institutions" to carry out these checks "under their purview."

New form of corruption           

The announcement sparked outrage and wide speculation that moves by the police and security forces to check another document in addition to an identity card would have led not only to chaos but a widespread new form of corruption amongst police officers.

A former telecommunications regulator, Rohan Samarajiva has come out strongly against the proposal of requiring mobile phone users to carry a document with them, and has proposed several alternatives that he says are "simpler than asking eight million people to carry receipts."

Highlighting the fact that just like our National Identity Cards (NICs), this new 'certificate' could also be forged by criminal and terrorist elements, and that it is only the innocent public who would thus be plagued with inconvenience, Samarajiva has proposed that a law be enacted to criminalise the use of a mobile connection registered under one's name being used for criminal activity.

"That of course would require that one goes through the Law Commission and then parliament," the retired official has lamented, pointing out that this is "the way problems are solved in democracies." What is ironic is that the certificate request has emanated from the Defence Ministry, even through the TRC is absorbing the flak for it from the public.

The defence authorities themselves are aware that even the current NIC is readily forged and fraudulently issued at the hands of criminal and terrorist elements. Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse himself is known to be keeping a close 'eye' on the ongoing tender at the Registrar of Persons Department for a new 'electronic' NIC system, for fear that even state of the art technology -leave alone our current joke of an identification system - could be circumvented by the LTTE.

Out of context

The incumbent telecom Czar, TRC Commissioner General, Priyantha Kariyapperuma told The Sunday Leader that he is of the view that the current media maelstrom over the proposed move is taking his initiatives out of context.

Kariyapperuma explained that a huge obstacle facing criminal and terrorist investigations by the authorities is that authorities are led to dead ends when they try to find out more about mobile phones used in serious crimes. Terrorists and mob elements alike have often used mobile connections registered under false names and those of dead persons and used these connections to help coordinate crimes, and allegedly to detonate bombs as well.

The TRC, according to its Commissioner General, is simply moving to try and put a stop to this practice and help ensure that the authorities can be aware at any given time of who the 'user' of any mobile phone number is.

Information collected from cellular phone use has been essential to authorities in cracking serious crimes - usually poorly planned or ill-conceived ones - both in Sri Lanka and around the world. One example is when the CID managed to use mobile phone records to crack the Royal Park murder case of Yvonne Johnson in July, 2005 less than 24 hours after the crime was committed.

Hours after the body of the fashion design student was discovered on one of the stairwells of the Rajagiriya condominium, CID officers had begun to pore through SMS and call records of associated persons (in some cases, reading text messages up to seven months old) and used the evidence they collected to allegedly elicit a 'confession' from their main suspect on the day of the murder itself.

Breakthroughs

A year later, SMSes recovered from the mobile phone records of murdered defence journalist Sampath Lakmal Silva provided several breakthroughs for the CID in uncovering the persons behind his assassination, before the CID buried that investigation for reasons yet to be revealed.

What is not controversial is the TRC's long overdue move to enforce the accurate recording and maintenance of a register identifying the users of mobile phones. For reasons best known to him, President Mahinda Rajapakse has, since assuming the presidency, not devolved the TRC to the Telecommunications Ministry, but kept it under presidential control.

Over the past two and a half years, as the total number of SIM cards issued by Sri Lanka's mobile 'telcos' has more than doubled, neither the TRC nor any of the service providers have managed to maintain an accurate record of who is using which mobile phone number, an understandable nightmare for defence authorities dealing with the world's most ruthless terrorist organisation.

The TRC's new regulations are primarily aimed at creating an accurate register of mobile phone users and deactivating the millions of SIM cards whose users the telecom providers themselves are unable to identify. Out of nearly 11 million SIM cards issued by the four mobile operators - Dialog, Tigo, Hutch and Mobitel, there are only eight million registered mobile phone users leaving a huge number of SIM cards available for notorious uses that authorities would have absolutely no watch over.

Not insisting

According to Kariyapperuma, the TRC is (thankfully) not insisting that mobile users carry some kind of certificate with them, but is in the process of negotiating with telecom providers, a mutually agreeable standard to help the security forces ascertain who the registered user of a mobile connection is.

"One of our favoured options is a short code that can be dialled from any phone, and a reply will immediately come from the operator giving the name and address to which the phone is registered to," the TRC chief proposed. "This would be the most secure way as there is nothing that can be forged," he elaborated.

Kariyapperuma's preferred method has thus far only been implemented by one operator, Dialog Telekom. The '077' provider has launched a mobile certificate service that functions precisely as the TRC Director General advocated, however other operators such as Tigo are to utilise a paper based system linked to a loyalty card.

Both systems are flexible enough to help the operators to keep a loose track on their subscribers, but there are sufficient loopholes to render the measures useless to security forces. For example, women who have their identity cards issued before they get married - i.e. nearly all of them - would have to present additional paperwork to prove their post-marriage last name if they want to get their mobile connection verified.

The additional paper trail would make it tedious for everyday users to comply with the new regulations. Yet it would be child's play for the LTTE or any other serious terrorist or criminal outfit to make use of the sophisticated forgery and fraud systems at their disposal to obtain connections with false documents.

Ridiculous

Perhaps the most ridiculous of the TRC's new enforced regulations is the order that CDMA phones cannot be used outside of their registered address. CDMA technology is essentially a mobile technology and a lot of its versatility is based on this fact. CDMA phones in Sri Lanka are also much larger than today's tiny widespread GSM phones, and thus much harder to hide.

Such a regulation would be impossible to police effectively, and would either become redundant, or have the effect of causing authorities to become complacent in their investigations, believing that CDMA phones will not be used for mobile crimes. The technology for circumventing this rule is not readily available, but is surely within the grasp of the LTTE.

Just as Sri Lanka uses GSM technology for its mobile phones, countries such as Canada and the USA have sizable mobile networks using CDMA technology, with users carrying CDMA phones as small as our GSM phones, which are also manufactured by known companies such as Nokia, Samsung and Sony-Ericsson.

The Tigers could very easily reverse engineer one of these tiny American or Canadian handsets to use, for example, an SLT CDMA connection, unknown to Sri Lanka Telecom, and use it for their sinister purposes whilst avoiding detection from the police and armed forces checkpoints.

Although the TRC, according to Kariyapperuma, is working with good intentions to help provide security and minimize inconvenience, the way in which it has gone about its task has sparked such controversy that it was forced last week to announce a delay in implementing its new regulations.

No support

Although Kariyapperuma told us that the TRC was working "as a team" with the mobile operators, not one of them has spoken out in support of the new TRC proposals since they were announced. A spokesperson for Dialog GSM did not reply our request for comment.

It is obvious that the new rules were spurred into existence by an increasingly stringent Defence Ministry. Although the defence authorities are within their mandate to request that any arm of government aid them in providing security, it is up to those arms to ensure that they aid the Ministry in the most logical, practical and well thought out way.

The TRC's decision to 'postpone' the implementation of its new regulations no sooner it announced them, is a clear indication that they did not exercise this level of prudence and foresight in this case.