Advocata fellow Ravi Ratnasabapathy was on Newsline speaking about the 2018 budget proposals
Ravi Ratnasabapathy on Budget 2018
Ravi Ratnasabapathy on the Budget 2018 and the economy
Advocata fellow Ravi Ratnasabapathy was on Face the Nation program a nationally televised program on current affairs and policy.
Privacy concerns around the National Registry of Persons
The Hindu reported on Advocata fellow's concerns about the National Registry of Persons, a central database of citizen data, including family information that's part of Sri Lankan government's E-NIC program.
From the Hindu:
Just as it appeared ready to part with more information through the RTI Act, the government was gearing up to demand more information from the people, through the Electronic-NIC, with family details and fingerprints as biometrics. For many within the government and outside, the E-NIC is merely an effort to “establish identity of Sri Lankan citizens using modern technology”, as the Department of Registration of Persons puts it. They see the initiative as neither an aberration nor a surprise, given the government’s known thrust on technology. This is a government that is talking about replacing school textbooks with tablets.
But for others, such a centrally-managed electronic database foretells serious risks around privacy and security. Observing that the authorities would have “virtually unrestricted access to any information concerning any citizen recorded with any public authority,” R. Ratnasabapathy of Advocata, a Colombo-based policy think tank, petitioned the Supreme Court after the government gazetted the new regulations in August. “Apart from threatening citizens’ right to privacy, such a database will enable mass surveillance,” he says.
Seen through a legal lens, the E-NIC coming into operation appears particularly dangerous in Sri Lankan jurisdiction as the country does not have a Data Protection Act, according to Samantha de Soysa, a lawyer working on privacy law. “This is a human right and Sri Lanka has clearly dismissed the importance of the violation of our data,” she argues
Roar explains Advocata Research on Food Taxes
Roar.lk, Sri Lanka's rich media platform featured Advocata's research on food taxes in one of it's ex plainer videos. Advocata launched a project to track food taxes in September.
Advocata collaborates with Yamu to calculate tax on your cake -- it's 35%
Advocata collaborated with food media website Yamu to produce this video that calculate the tax of a butter cake. The calculations are elaborated on our interactive page.
This is to highlight the high impact of import tariffs on everyday food items and how much of the import tax forms as a proportion of the sales price.
Find out more about Advocata's research on food taxes.
Adocata's food tax tracker introduced on NewsFirst
Adocata resident fellow Ravi Ratnasabapathy introduced Advocata's food tax tracker on news first and spoke about how food taxes are making things expensive for ordinary Sri Lankans.