Features

The building boom that transformed Colombo over 100 years ago

Published

3 years ago

2023/03/5

by Hugh Karunanayake

Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called, had hardly any commercial or mercantilism during the nineteenth century when it was gradually emerging from a peasant society into a plantation economy. There were two major factors which contributed towards the commercialization of Colombo as a city. The first was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 which made a tremendous impact on trade relations between the occident and the orient. The other significant factor was the construction of the South Western Breakwater enabling the entry of steam ships into Colombo’s harbour.

Up until then Galle was the main port of Ceylon and the city of Galle was the main centre for shipping to and from the country. During most part of the 19th century, the Galle harbour apart from being the port of entry and departure for international travel, was also the centre of what could be described as a service hub for tourists. During that time there were only two hotels in Colombo that would serve the needs of international travelers, the Royal Hotel which stood at the site of the present General Post Office in Queen Street, and the Galle Face Hotel, then known as the Galle Face Boarding House.

The city of Galle however had about half a dozen hotels with desirable levels of occupancy by visitors arriving in the island. Excepting the Pavilion Hotel run by Mrs Braybrooke, located across the road facing the Ramparts, the others were all located within the Fort of Galle. There was Eglington Hotel in Hospital Street, Loret’s Hotel in Middle Street, the Sea View Hotel in Church Street run by the Ephraums family, and the Oriental Company’s Hotel also in Church Street, later acquired by the Ephraums family and run as New Oriental Hotel.

The other major tourist related industry was the gem and jewellery shops of which there were also about ten all located in the Fort and especially in Middle Street. With the opening of the South Western Breakwater, the first stages of the development of Colombo as a harbour city, commenced. It also heralded the beginning of the decline of the use of the Port of Galle and its related enterprises, as the ship chandlering businesses, and the jewellery and gem traders all moved to Colombo.

Although the first stream ship to traverse the Suez Canal to Colombo “The Wm Miller” arrived at the post of Colombo on 10 February 1870, the facilities for harbouring of such a craft were not fully available. A deputation from the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce presented a petition to the government in September 1870 urging the government for better harbouring facilities. Two months later government plans to expand the Galle harbour were officially abandoned. In the following year, 1871, the walls of the Dutch Fort of Colombo were demolished and the surrounding moats filled.

In 1875 the foundation stone for the construction of the South West Breakwater of the Colombo harbour was laid by the visiting Prince of Wales. The completion of the project took a few years and was carried out by Resident Engineer Mr John Kyle under the direction of Sir John Coode the most distinguished harbour engineer in the world.

He successfully implemented several harbour and river improvement projects in various parts of the British Empire including Australia where he planned and oversaw some changes to the gradient of the Yarra River. Through his expertise, the Colombo harbour was facilitated to receive any size of ship traversing the oceans by the 1890s.

The facilities provided by the harbour created a natural demand for greater commercial activity. At the cusp of the new commercialization was a desire to erect buildings such as those that had been erected in other parts of the Empire. Possibly the first building to herald the late Victorian/Edwardian building boom in the Colombo Fort was the construction of the General Post Office on the site where the Royal Hotel stood. The Royal Hotel was the only hotel in the Fort. Built on neo classical lines.

It was run by a Sinhalese dubasher with the unlikely name of Morris! The GPO was planned by Mr Tunstall an architect and implemented under the supervision of Mr Tomalin of the PWD in the early 1890s. The GPO was the largest building of the time in Colombo and when completed was open to the public for several days during which thousands gazed in wonder at the masterpiece!

During the security clamp of the late 20 th Century around Presidents House which stands opposite to the GPO, the building had remained unoccupied for many years, and remains so now. A sad finale to a building with a glorious past. It is heartening to note that there are no plans to demolish this splendid piece of colonial architecture which is part of our national heritage.

In about 1895 the Fort Land and Building Company acquired the block of land on York Street where National Grindlays Bank stands right up to the road facing the jetty. At the time the upper part of York Street consisted of small shops mainly jewellery and curio shops.

The Company demolished the existing small buildings and constructed Victoria Arcade and the building which the Grindlays Bank now occupy. On the opposite side of York Street stood Cargills then a single storied shop. It was previously a residence for Mr Phillip Sluyskens a Dutch resident who moved to his country house in Kelaniya after Cargills purchased his house.

Walker and Sons the pre eminent engineering firm even then, were occupying a small building at the Fort end of Main Street, which they demolished and constructed a large elegant three storied building completed in 1911. Walkers were the contractors for a new building for Cargills Ltd and their newly constructed building in Main Street were let out temporarily to Cargills. A large wooden carving of Minerva the Goddess was found during the construction of Cargills and it was placed in a niche in the new building and could be seen to this day.

In about 1915 the new building for Mr Abdul Cafoor the gem merchant was constructed in Main Street, and from the time of its opening the firm of HW Cave and Sons were the principal tenants, having moved from Amens Corner where the Bogala Building stands in Upper Chatham Street facing the Baurs Building. The Bogala building was originally the property of Sir Charles Henry de Soysa, the first Ceylonese millionaire. Sadly, the Gafoor building has passed its use by date and in recent years rendered unsuitable for occupation due to instability. Measures were afoot to stabilize the building, but this writer is not aware of the outcomes.

Now here is the story behind Australia Building, a building in the heart of Colombo named after Australia, a quizzical name which kept many wondering about its background. In about 1895 the old Millers building on York Street, a single story unkempt building, was auctioned. The buyer was Kerri Davies an Australian timber merchant who had business connections with Mr R B Carson the founder of Carson Cumberbatch and Co. Mr Davies constructed the new building which was to house Millers Ltd and the building was named Australia Building to honour the nationality of its owner..

Bristol Hotel was under the management of Mr WST Saunders who decided to add a new wing with a theatre but the construction proved to be unsuitable and the wing was used to create more bedrooms for the Hotel which was then very upmarket. Incidentally, the Bristol Hotel was the first building in Colombo to boast of ceiling fans. The honour of being the first building to be supplied with electricity goes to the Colombo Club on Galle Face which was “electrified” in 1893.The Bristol Hotel followed shortly thereafter.

St Andrews Church stood on Prince Street, and moved to its new premises on Galle Road Kollupitiya in 1912. Its site was used to construct the building of another large departmental store Whiteaway Laidlaw and Co already well established in places like Hong Kong, Saigon and Singapore. Part of the Whiteaway building was sold to Freudenberg and Co to subsidize cost of construction.

Soon after, Harrisons and Crosfield whose predecessors Crosfield, Lampard and Co occupied a site on Victoria Arcade sought to construct a new building. The new Harrisons and Crosfield building five stories high brought the Fort landscape to new heights. All these new structures which appeared during the last decade of the 19th Century and the first two decades of the twentieth century, gave Colombo a new look and an air of sophistication and confidence which did the British Empire proud.

Many, if not all the major building around Colombo, were constructed by the engineering firm of Walker Sons and Co established in 1854. It engaged two principal contractors to work under its supervision Messr UDS Gunasekera and Wapiche Marikkar. In 1904 the company published a booklet containing testimonials and illustrations of some of the principal buildings erected by them in Ceylon of which many were in Colombo.

They included Australia Building, the Victoria Building, the P and O office, the National Bank of India Ltd, Messrs Cargills Building, Whiteaway Laidlaw and Co, Miller and Co. The role of Walkers in the rebuilding of Colombo is little remembered today, but the strikingly beautiful Victorian and Edwardian architecture that dominates the Fort landscape does the country proud, and the buildings now preserved for posterity. Fortunately many of the buildings referred to, have been left intact, with Commercial development in recent decades mainly occurring along the Galle Road and Duplication Road areas.

The Fort area being subject to security containment due to the location of President’s House within the Fort, has in recent decades seen some unintended consequences in the preservation of the beautiful old Victorian and Edwardian structures. It has to be remembered that the concept of the multi department store as was seen in Cargills Ltd, Miller Ltd, Whiteaway Laidlaw and Co, Colombo Apothecaries Ltd now seems to be obsolete.

In its day and age when Britannia ‘ruled the waves’ and also ‘waived the rules’ products from Britain totally dominated the market. Those days are now long past, and so are the products from the Metropolitan power that fed those large departmental stores. Post World War 2 developments saw the emergence of Japan, Korea, China and other countries of the East emerging as the dominant leaders of markets for consumables. The supermarket concept has arrived and is bound to dominate commercial activity relating to the household sector for years to come.

The significance of the Colombo harbour as a passenger port also has greatly diminished with cheaper, faster, air travel, now being the popular mode of international travel. However the challenge is for our urban planners to make a viable “heritage precinct” within the Fort retaining the Department Store as a feature of the City’s heritage. Harrods in London, and the House of Tang in Singapore are two colonial departmental stores that have withstood the challenges of modernism, and perhaps the time is opportune for us to take a closer look at similar opportunities.

Despite the onward march of time, the old Fort of Colombo holds some treasured memories for those of us who lived through that quiet, almost forgotten, genteel era and the time may be ripe to preserve the spirit of a bygone age to be savoured by present and future generations.

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Features

A wage for housework? India’s sweeping experiment in paying women

Published

9 hours ago

2025/12/9

Priyan

Women in Maharashtra aged 21-65 receive a monthly cash transfer of 1,500 rupees ($16) [BBC]

In a village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, a woman receives a small but steady sum each month – not wages, for she has no formal job, but an unconditional cash transfer from the government.

Premila Bhalavi says the money covers medicines, vegetables and her son’s school fees. The sum, 1,500 rupees ($16: £12), may be small, but its effect – predictable income, a sense of control and a taste of independence – is anything but.

Her story is increasingly common. Across India, 118 million adult women in 12 states now receive unconditional cash transfers from their governments, making India the site of one of the world’s largest and least-studied social-policy experiments.

Long accustomed to subsidising grain, fuel and rural jobs, India has stumbled into something more radical: paying adult women simply because they keep households running, bear the burden of unpaid care and form an electorate too large to ignore.

Eligibility filters vary – age thresholds, income caps and exclusions for families with government employees, taxpayers or owners of cars or large plots of land.

“The unconditional cash transfers signal a significant expansion of Indian states’ welfare regimes in favour of women,” Prabha Kotiswaran, a professor of law and social justice at King’s College London, told the BBC.

The transfers range from 1,000-2,500 rupees ($12-$30) a month – meagre sums, worth roughly 5-12% of household income, but regular. With 300 million women now holding bank accounts, transfers have become administratively simple.

Women typically spend the money on household and family needs – children’s education, groceries, cooking gas, medical and emergency expenses, retiring small debts and occasional personal items like gold or small comforts.

What sets India apart from Mexico, Brazil or Indonesia – countries with large conditional cash-transfer schemes – is the absence of conditions: the money arrives whether or not a child attends school or a household falls below the poverty line.

AFP Women voters stand in queues to cast their ballots at a polling station during the first phase of voting for assembly elections on November 6, 2025, at the Raghopur constituency in the Vaishali district of the Indian state of Bihar. — *Bihar transferred 10,000 rupees to women’s bank accounts ahead of polls [BBC]*

Goa was the first state to launch an unconditional cash transfer scheme to women in 2013. The phenomenon picked up just before the pandemic in 2020, when north-eastern Assam rolled out a scheme for vulnerable women. Since then these transfers have turned into a political juggernaut.

The recent wave of unconditional cash transfers targets adult women, with some states acknowledging their unpaid domestic and care work. Tamil Nadu frames its payments as a “rights grant” while West Bengal’s scheme similarly recognises women’s unpaid contributions.

In other states, the recognition is implicit: policymakers expect women to use the transfers for household and family welfare, say experts.

This focus on women’s economic role has also shaped politics: in 2021, Tamil actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan promised “salaries for housewives”. (His fledgling party lost.) By 2024, pledges of women-focused cash transfers helped deliver victories to political parties in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Odisha, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh.

In the recent elections in Bihar, the political power of cash transfers was on stark display. In the weeks before polling in the country’s poorest state, the government transferred 10,000 rupees ($112; £85) to 7.5 million female bank accounts under a livelihood-generation scheme. Women voted in larger numbers than men, decisively shaping the outcome.

Critics called it blatant vote-buying, but the result was clear: women helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition secure a landslide victory. Many believe this cash infusion was a reminder of how financial support can be used as political leverage.

Yet Bihar is only one piece of a much larger picture. Across India, unconditional cash transfers are reaching tens of millions of women on a regular basis.

Maharashtra alone promises benefits for 25 million women; Odisha’s scheme reaches 71% of its female voters.

In some policy circles, the schemes are derided as vote-buying freebies. They also put pressure on state finances: 12 states are set to spend around $18bn on such payouts this fiscal year. A report by think-tank PRS Legislative Research notes that half of these states face revenue deficits – this happens when a state borrows to pay regular expenses without creating assets.

But many argue they also reflect a slow recognition of something India’s feminists have argued for decades: the economic value of unpaid domestic and care work.

Women in India spent nearly five hours a day on such work in 2024 – more than three times the time spent by men, according to the latest Time Use Survey. This lopsided burden helps explain India’s stubbornly low female labour-force participation. The cash transfers, at least, acknowledge the imbalance, experts say.

Do they work?

Evidence is still thin but instructive. A 2025 study in Maharashtra found that 30% of eligible women did not register – sometimes because of documentation problems, sometimes out of a sense of self-sufficiency. But among those who did, nearly all controlled their own bank accounts.

Swastik Pal Soma Das sells clothes using the money, supporting her seven-member household in West Bengal — *Soma Das sells clothes using the money, supporting her household in West Bengal [BBC]*

A 2023 survey in West Bengal found that 90% operated their accounts themselves and 86% decided how to spend the money. Most used it for food, education and medical costs; hardly transformative, but the regularity offered security and a sense of agency.

More detailed work by Prof Kotiswaran and colleagues shows mixed outcomes.

In Assam, most women spent the money on essentials; many appreciated the dignity it afforded, but few linked it to recognition of unpaid work, and most would still prefer paid jobs.

In Tamil Nadu, women getting the money spoke of peace of mind, reduced marital conflict and newfound confidence – a rare social dividend. In Karnataka, beneficiaries reported eating better, gaining more say in household decisions and wanting higher payments.

Yet only a sliver understood the scheme as compensation for unpaid care work; messaging had not travelled. Even so, women said the money allowed them to question politicians and manage emergencies. Across studies, the majority of women had full control of the cash.

“The evidence shows that the cash transfers are tremendously useful for women to meet their own immediate needs and those of their households. They also restore dignity to women who are otherwise financially dependent on their husbands for every minor expense,” Prof Kotiswaran says.

Importantly, none of the surveys finds evidence that the money discourages women from seeking paid work or entrench gender roles – the two big feminist fears, according to a report by Prof Kotiswaran along with Gale Andrew and Madhusree Jana.

Nor have they reduced women’s unpaid workload, the researchers find. They do, however, strengthen financial autonomy and modestly strengthen bargaining power. They are neither panacea nor poison: they are useful but limited tools, operating in a patriarchal society where cash alone cannot undo structural inequities.

Swastik Pal Women at a cash transfer camp in West Bengal — *Women welcome the dignity the cash transfers provide [BBC]*

What next?

The emerging research offers clear hints.

Eligibility rules should be simplified, especially for women doing heavy unpaid care work. Transfers should remain unconditional and independent of marital status.

But messaging should emphasise women’s rights and the value of unpaid work, and financial-literacy efforts must deepen, researchers say. And cash transfers cannot substitute for employment opportunities; many women say what they really want is work that pays and respect that endures.

“If the transfers are coupled with messaging on the recognition of women’s unpaid work, they could potentially disrupt the gendered division of labour when paid employment opportunities become available,” says Prof Kotiswaran.

India’s quiet cash transfers revolution is still in its early chapters. But it already shows that small, regular sums – paid directly to women – can shift power in subtle, significant ways.

Whether this becomes a path to empowerment or merely a new form of political patronage will depend on what India chooses to build around the money.

[BBC]

Features

People set example for politicians to follow

Published

11 hours ago

2025/12/9

Sahan Weerasooriya

Disaster relief (AFP picture)

Some opposition political parties have striven hard to turn the disaster of Cyclone Ditwah to their advantage. A calamity of such unanticipated proportions ought to have enabled all political parties to come together to deal with this tragedy. Failure to do so would indicate both political and moral bankruptcy. The main issue they have forcefully brought up is the government’s failure to take early action on the Meteorological Department’s warnings. The Opposition even convened a meeting of their own with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe and other senior politicians who shared their experience of dealing with natural and man-made disasters of the past, and the present government’s failures to match them.

The difficulty to anticipate the havoc caused by the cyclone was compounded by the neglect of the disaster management system, which includes previous governments that failed to utilise the allocated funds in an open, transparent and corruption free manner. Land designated as “Red Zones” by the National Building Research Organisation (NBRO), a government research and development institute, were built upon by people and ignored by successive governments, civil society and the media alike. NBRO was established in 1984. According to NBRO records, the decision to launch a formal “Landslide Hazard Zonation Mapping Project (LHMP)” dates from 1986. The institutional process of identifying landslide-prone slopes, classifying zones (including what we today call “Red Zones”), and producing hazard maps, started roughly 35 to 40 years ago.

Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines which were lashed by cyclones at around the same time as Sri Lanka experienced Cyclone Ditwah were also unprepared and also suffered enormously. The devastation caused by cyclones in the larger southeast Asian region is due to global climate change. During Cyclone Ditwah some parts of the central highlands received more than 500 mm of rainfall. Official climatological data cite the average annual rainfall for Sri Lanka as roughly 1850 mm though this varies widely by region: from around 900 mm in the dry zones up to 5,000 mm in wet zones. The torrential rains triggered by Ditwah were so heavy that for some communities they represented a rainfall surge comparable to a major part of their typical annual rainfall.

Inclusive Approach

Climate change now joins the pantheon of Sri Lanka’s challenges that are beyond the ability of a single political party or government to resolve. It is like the economic bankruptcy, ethnic conflict and corruption in governance that requires an inclusive approach in which the Opposition, civil society, religious society and the business community need to join rather than merely criticise the government. It will be in their self-interest to do so. A younger generation (Gen Z), with more energy and familiarity with digital technologies filled, the gaps that the government was unable to fill and, in a sense, made both the Opposition and traditional civil society redundant.

Within hours of news coming in that floods and landslides were causing havoc to hundreds of thousands of people, a people’s movement for relief measures was underway. There was no one organiser or leader. There were hundreds who catalysed volunteers to mobilise to collect resources and to cook meals for the victims in community kitchens they set up. These community kitchens sprang up in schools, temples, mosques, garages and even roadside stalls. Volunteers used social media to crowdsource supplies, match donors with delivery vehicles, and coordinate routes that had become impassable due to fallen trees or mudslides. It was a level of commitment and coordination rarely achieved by formal institutions.

The spontaneous outpouring of support was not only a youth phenomenon. The larger population, too, contributed to the relief effort. The Galle District Secretariat sent 23 tons of rice to the cyclone affected areas from donations brought by the people. The Matara District Secretariat made arrangements to send teams of volunteers to the worst affected areas. Just as in the Aragalaya protest movement of 2022, those who joined the relief effort were from all ethnic and religious communities. They gave their assistance to anyone in need, regardless of community. This showed that in times of crisis, Sri Lankans treat others without discrimination as human beings, not as members of specific communities.

Turning Point

The challenge to the government will be to ensure that the unity among the people that the cyclone disaster has brought will outlive the immediate relief phase and continue into the longer term task of national reconstruction. There will be a need to rethink the course of economic development to ensure human security. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has spoken about the need to resettle all people who live above 5000 feet and to reforest those areas. This will require finding land for resettlement elsewhere. The resettlement of people in the hill country will require that the government address the issue of land rights for the Malaiyaha Tamils.

Since independence the Malaiyaha Tamils have been collectively denied ownership to land due first to citizenship issues and now due to poverty and unwillingness of plantation managements to deal with these issues in a just and humanitarian manner beneficial to the workers. Their resettlement raises complex social, economic and political questions. It demands careful planning to avoid repeating past mistakes where displaced communities were moved to areas lacking water, infrastructure or livelihoods. It also requires political consensus, as land is one of the most contentious issues in Sri Lanka, tied closely to identity, ethnicity and historical grievances. Any sustainable solution must go beyond temporary relocation and confront the historical exclusion of the Malaiyaha Tamil community, whose labour sustains the plantation economy but who remain among the poorest groups in the country.

Cyclone Ditwah has thus become a turning point. It has highlighted the need to strengthen governance and disaster preparedness, but it has also revealed a different possibility for Sri Lanka, one in which the people lead with humanity and aspire for the wellbeing of all, and the political leadership emulates their example. The people have shown through their collective response to Cyclone Ditwah that unity and compassion remain strong, which a sincere, moral and hardworking government can tap into. The challenge to the government will be to ensure that the unity among the people that the cyclone disaster has brought will outlive the immediate relief phase and continue into the longer term task of national reconstruction with political reconciliation.

by Jehan Perera

Features

An awakening: Revisiting education policy after Cyclone Ditwah

Published

11 hours ago

2025/12/9

Sahan Weerasooriya

One of the schools flooded during the recent disasters. (Image courtesy Sri Lanka Navy)

In the short span of two or three days, Cyclone Ditwah, has caused a disaster of unprecedented proportions in our midst. Lashing away at almost the entirety of the country, it has broken through the ramparts of centuries old structures and eroded into areas, once considered safe and secure.

The rains may have passed us by. The waters will recede, shops will reopen, water will be in our taps, and we can resume the daily grind of life. But it will not be the same anymore; it should not be. It should not be business as usual for any of us, nor for the government. Within the past few years, Sri Lankan communities have found themselves in the middle of a crisis after crisis, both natural and man-made, but always made acute by the myopic policies of successive governments, and fuelled by the deeply hierarchical, gendered and ethnicised divides that exist within our societies. The need of the hour for the government today is to reassess its policies and rethink the directions the country, as a whole, has been pushed into.

Neoliberal disaster

In the aftermath of the devastation caused by the natural disaster, fundamental questions have been raised about our existence. Our disaster is, in whole or in part, the result of a badly and cruelly managed environment of the planet. Questions have been raised about the nature of our economy. We need to rethink the way land is used. Livelihoods may have to be built anew, promoting people’s welfare, and by deveoloping a policy on climate change. Mega construction projects is a major culprit as commentators have noted. Landslides in the upcountry are not merely a result of Ditwah lashing at our shores and hills, but are far more structural and points to centuries of mismanagement of land. (https://island.lk/weather-disasters-sri-lanka-flooded-by-policy-blunders-weak-enforcement-and-environmental-crime-climate-expert/). It is also about the way people have been shunted into lands, voluntarily or involuntarily, that are precarious, in their pursuit of a viable livelihood, within the limited opportunities available to them.

Neo liberal policies that demand unfettered land appropriation and built on the premise of economic growth at any expense, leading to growing rural-urban divides, need to be scrutinised for their short and long term consequences. And it is not that any of these economic drives have brought any measure of relief and rejuvenation of the economy. We have been under the tyrannical hold of the IMF, camouflaged as aid and recovery, but sinking us deeper into the debt trap. In October 2025, Ahilan Kadirgamar writes, that the IMF programme by the end of 2027, “will set up Sri Lanka for the next crisis.” He also lambasts the Central Bank and the government’s fiscal policy for their punishing interest rates in the context of disinflation and rising poverty levels. We have had to devalue the rupee last month, and continue to rely on the workforce of domestic workers in West Asia as the major source of foreign exchange. The government’s negotiations with the IMF have focused largely on relief and infrastructure rebuilding, despite calls from civil society, demanding debt justice.

The government has unabashedly repledged its support for the big business class. The cruelest cut of them all is the appointment of a set of high level corporate personalities to the post-disaster recovery committee, with the grand name, “Rebuilding Sri Lanka.” The message is loud and clear, and is clearly a slap in the face of the working people of the country, whose needs run counter to the excessive greed of extractive corporate freeloaders. Economic growth has to be understood in terms that are radically different from what we have been forced to think of it as, till now. For instance, instead of investment for high profits, and the business of buy and sell in the market, rechannel investment and labour into overall welfare. Even catch phrases like sustainable development have missed their mark. We need to think of the economy more holistically and see it as the sustainability of life, livelihood and the wellbeing of the planet.

The disaster has brought on an urgency for rethinking our policies. One of the areas where this is critical is education. There are two fundamental challenges facing education: Budget allocation and priorities. In an address at a gathering of the Chamber of Commerce, on 02 December, speaking on rebuilding efforts, the Prime Minister and Minister of Education Dr. Harini Amarasuriya restated her commitment to the budget that has been passed, a budget that has a meagre 2.4% of the GDP allocated for education. This allocation for education comes in a year that educational reforms are being rolled out, when heavy expenses will likely be incurred. In the aftermath of the disaster, this has become more urgent than ever.

Reforms in Education

The Government has announced a set of amendments to educational policy and implementation, with little warning and almost no consultation with the public, found in the document, Transforming General Education in Sri Lanka 2025 published by the Ministry of Education. Though hailed as transformative by the Prime Minister (https://www.news.lk/current-affairs/in-the-prevailing-situation-it-is-necessary-to-act-strategically-while-creating-the-proper-investments-ensuring-that-actions-are-discharged-on-proper-policies-pm), the policy is no more than a regurgitation of what is already there, made worse. There are a few welcome moves, like the importance placed on vocational training. Here, I want to raise three points relating to vital areas of the curriculum that are of concern: 1) streamlining at an early age; relatedly 2) prioritising and privileging what is seen as STEM education; and 3) introducing a credit-based modular education.

1. A study of the policy document will demonstrate very clearly that streamlining begins with Junior Secondary Education via a career interest test, that encourages students to pursue a particular stream in higher studies. Further Learning Modules at both “Junior Secondary Education” and “Senior Secondary Education Phase I,” entrench this tendency. Psychometric testing, that furthers this goal, as already written about in our column (https://kuppicollective.lk/psychometrics-and-the-curriculum-for-general-education/) points to the bizarre.

2. The kernel of the curriculum of the qualifying examination of Senior Secondary Education Phase I, has five mandatory subjects, including First Language, Math, and Science. There is no mandatory social science or humanities related subject. One can choose two subjects from a set of electives that has history and geography as separate subjects, but a Humanities/Social Science subject is not in the list of mandatory subjects. .

3. A credit-based, modular education: Even in universities, at the level of an advanced study of a discipline, many of us are struggling with module-based education. The credit system promotes a fragmented learning process, where, depth is sacrificed for quick learning, evaluated numerically, in credit values.

Units of learning, assessed, piece meal, are emphasised over fundamentals and the detailing of fundamentals. Introducing a module based curriculum in secondary education can have an adverse impact on developing the capacity of a student to learn a subject in a sustained manner at deeper levels.

Education wise, and pedagogically, we need to be concerned about rigidly compartmentalising science oriented, including technological subjects, separately from Humanities and Social Studies. This cleavage is what has led to the idea of calling science related subjects, STEM, automatically devaluing humanities and social sciences. Ironically, universities, today, have attempted, in some instances, to mix both streams in their curriculums, but with little success; for the overall paradigm of education has been less about educational goals and pedagogical imperatives, than about technocratic priorities, namely, compartmentalisation, fragmentation, and piecemeal consumerism. A holistic response to development needs to rethink such priorities, categorisations and specialisations. A social and sociological approach has to be built into all our educational and development programmes.

National Disasters and Rebuilding Community

In the aftermath of the disaster, the role of education has to be rethought radically. We need a curriculum that is not trapped in the dichotomy of STEM and Humanities, and be overly streamlined and fragmented. The introduction of climate change as a discipline, or attention to environmental destruction cannot be a STEM subject, a Social Science/Humanities subject or even a blend of the two. It is about the vision of an economic-cum-educational policy that sees the environment and the economy as a function of the welfare of the people. Educational reforms must be built on those fundamentals and not on real or imagined short term goals, promoted at the economic end by neo liberal policies and the profiteering capitalist class.

As I write this, the sky brightens with its first streaks of light, after days of incessant rain and gloom, bringing hope into our hearts, and some cheer into the hearts of those hundreds of thousands of massively affected people, anxiously waiting for a change in the weather every second of their lives. The sense of hope that allows us to forge ahead is collective and social. The response by Lankan communities, to the disaster, has been tremendously heartwarming, infusing hope into what still is a situation without hope for many. This spirit of collective endeavour holds the promise for what should be the foundation for recovery. People’s demands and needs should shape the re-envisioning of policy, particularly in the vital areas of education and economy.

(Sivamohan Sumathy was formerly attached to the Department of English, University of Peradeniya)

Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.

By Sivamohan Sumathy