Saturday, January 30, 2016

My beef with the proposed ETCA


Economic and Technological Cooperation Agreement(ETCA) is a hot topic in Colombo these days(specially so if your employed in the IT sector). As someone who is not too interested in happenings outside his immediate bubble ETCA reached my ear only a few weeks back. So during these last two weeks I looked into what how ETCA would impact the IT industry and the country as a whole so that I could make up my own mind about it.

As I understand(please do take into consideration that I have next to no education in economics, legislation or sociology) ETCA would benefit the economy. Companies who operate by volume could bid for larger projects and companies who are willing to pay the price of “real experts” (beef no .3) could do so with ease and these workers would increase these companies revenue. In the long run ETCA should increase the pay of the average IT employee as well(as a bigger IT workforce would build a bigger IT sector with more revenue driving the GDP higher)

So then whats my beef with ETCA?

  1. From all information I've been able to gather professional bodies representing IT such as CSSL, SLASSCOM upto date were not included in making of it.
  1. Have we looked into the social impact of the ETCA. Such as what would happen to those who might loose their jobs due to it.(Is there a safety net of sorts for these people?)
  1. How do we ensure that the workers who come in are actually experts? Would a filtering mechanism be implemented? at least similar to that of Singapore where employees must have 2 or 3 years of work experience and have had a salary higher than a specific amount. 

  2. How do we increase IT graduate production so that one day we wont have such a need to bring workers down.

ETCA can be good if its done right. Seriously Sri Lanka get your shit together, its affecting my bubble!