The Cabinet of ministers has approved recognizing the ‘People’s Assembly’ or ‘Jana Sabha’ concept as a fundamental policy and the establishment of a National Jana Sabha Secretariat for implementing the system, in order to strengthen participatory democracy.
The National Movement for a Just Society has presented a concept paper on “People’s Council System” with an independent institutional structure where public participation can be ensured for the formulation of public policies and the successful implementation of those policies, since it will be possible to effectively and efficiently prevent public oppression that may occur due to bureaucracy and arbitrary politicization through an organized mechanism that actively finds public opinions for public policy formulation. The policies will accordingly be implemented along with community participation.
The concept paper has also proposed the establishment of the “National People’s Council” and “Village People’s Councils” to cover every Grama Niladhari Division across the Island.
The proposal of establishing the National People’s Council Secretariat for the formation of the People’s Council was put forward by the President as it was revealed that due to the gap between the center of governance and the people of the periphery, the representative democratic structures that have been operating in Sri Lanka do not pay due attention to the public opinion sufficiently in the policy and decision-making process and since the people’s real issues are not adequately addressed, social criticism is arising in this regard.
Taking into account the need for a strong mechanism where public officials and the public can discuss rural issues together, determine development priorities and rural people can participate in the decision-making process in an organizational structure where participatory democracy is practiced at the rural level has emerged, under the situation where it has also been seen that opinions and objections against representative democracy are emerging in the society, the Cabinet of Ministers has approved the relevant proposal to accept the proposed People’s Council system as a fundamental policy and to establish the “National People’s Council Secretariat” as the national level independent central institution for establishing the People’s Councils system.
