The Sri Lankan government continued with an existing scheme that grants soldiers in the armed forces a grant of Rs. 100,000 at the birth of the third child.

The proposal, which was part of the 2012 budget under the former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, has been carried out throughout the previous year to all members of the armed forces.

Previously, the grant was also awarded to police personnel, however the 2016 budget did not make that allocation, reports Daily Mirror.

In 2014, Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Defence announced that it had cashed out over Rs. 700 million to soldiers from the Sri Lankan Armed Forces in the past year alone, for more than 7,000 soldiers.

See our earlier post: 2012 budget fosters militarisation (21 November 2011)

Below is an extract from our earlier post: Sri Lanka’s monoethnic military (27 June 2011)

Prof. Brian Blodgett, Director of the History and Military Studies Programs for the American Public University, published a study of Sri Lanka’s military in 2004. In it he notes how,

“in 1962, a policy of recruiting only from the Sinhalese Buddhist community was instituted. This was the beginning of an ethnically pure army.”

Prof. Stanley Tambiah of Harvard University published a book length comment, ‘Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy’, just two years after Sri Lanka’s conflict began. In it he noted,

“[Today, in 1986] the armed forces are filled with Sinhalese and the Tamils are excluded from serving in them. … There has been virtually no recruitment of Tamils into the armed forces, and very little into the police force, for nearly thirty years.”

Also see our earlier post: Army's Sinhalese blood is in Tamils - senior military official (10 January 2014)