School uniform vouchers boost small biz: Govt.

By Ashwin Hemmathagama 

Our Lobby Correspondent

The Government yesterday defended the school uniform voucher system, saying it increased business opportunities for a range of small traders and boosted local communities.

Putting a stop to issuing low quality school uniform material, providing the options to select required amount of material for the student, reducing the returns, including the tailoring fee, and broadening the business opportunity among many vendors scattered all over the island, Ministry of Education initiated a voucher system this month.

Even though the Ministry was aiming to curb quality issues and to open up a business held in the hands of a few businesses, teachers, trade unions, some parents and some vendors were unhappy about deviating from the previous method.

Rejecting the charges mounting against the Government decision to replace the school uniform material distribution with a voucher, Minister of Education Akila Viraj Kariyawasam told Parliament that planning, printing, distribution and executing a voucher system was started on 16 November and was completed within 10 days.

Listing the issues and turning down the criticism, the Minister said: “Parents of the children in Grade 1-5 visit the schools regularly. At least they go there to obtain the report card, to take part in parents’ meetings, or for the concert. Instructions were to issue parents the voucher whenever they come to school so we have not wasted their time. Other students in higher grades were given the voucher. The voucher is valid till 28 February 2016.”

The Minister was highly vocal on principals’ lethargy. “Some principals claim they don’t have time to sign the vouchers. There are 10,121 schools in Sri Lanka. Out of this there are 9,175 schools with less than 1,000 students. There are 317 schools with over 2,000 student population and 119 with over 3,000 students. We have instructed the principals to increase the number of signatories eligible to sign for the school teachers’ salary account. However, according to records only 35% of the student population received the school uniform material before the end of the third term. Under the new system we were able to provide the voucher to over 95% of students in our school system,” he said.

According to the Minister, People’s Bank and the Bank of Ceylon may not require the rubber stamp of the principal on the voucher for authenticity to make payments to the merchant. 

“The merchant can check the authenticity of the voucher by sending a free SMS to 0714390000. He could redeem the voucher at Bank of Ceylon or at People’s Bank. The merchant need not maintain an account with any of these two banks but can obtain money over the counter,” added Minister Kariyawasam, who was confident the Government decision to replace uniform material distribution with a voucher was a success and would eliminate malpractices regardless of the critics who see storms in a teacup.