Associated Press

Kandy, May 15:

Sri Lanka has drawn up plans to help millions of people plunged into poverty by the country’s two decade civil war and December tsunami, with a first-time, UN-backed study identifying its critical development needs.

The government’s Millennium Development Goals Report, which was supported by the United Nations Development Programme, spotlights the disparity in development and the growing poverty in inland rural areas and the coastal belt affected by the December 26 tsunami. The study will be presented this week to an international aid forum in Kandy.

“There are about 5 million people living in poverty in Sri Lanka, perhaps more,” the UNDP said quoting the study, noting if statistics from districts affected by war were available, poverty figures would be higher.

The tsunami killed at least 31,000 people and displaced 1 million. The ethnic conflict killed 65,000 people and displaced 1.6 million —most of them minority Tamils — before a ceasefire was signed in 2002. Until the ceasefire there had been no development in the northeast, home to most of the country’s 3.2 million Tamils.

The government study assesses the UN target of halving poverty in Sri Lanka by 2015 and will be the yardstick by which the country measures the success of long and short-term strategies.

The World Bank, meanwhile, warned peace was critical to achieving those goals.