Features

Secretary, Ministry of Plantation Industries and back to the PM’s office as Secretary

Published

1 year ago

2025/04/27

Soon after the 1977 elections President J R Jayewardene’s secretary, Menikdiwela who had been my assistant in the Dudley Senanayake administration telephoned to say that he wanted to see me at his office at Republic Square about a new position in the government.

I had kept my links with ‘Meniks’ during my seven year exile. He was a man of strong attachments and a committed fighter for a cause. I was very touched to see him wish me farewell on the platform of the Fort railway station the evening in 1970 when Damayanthi and I took the lonely train to Batticaloa to begin our posting in Ampara. He and another of my former colleagues were the only ones who had taken the trouble to do so.

We discussed the possibility of my having to break my contract with the IPPF. That evening I discussed the question of whether I should stay with the IPPF or come back to government with Damayanthi and Esala. Esala was most forthright in saying that my place was with government, and if I was wanted, I should go back.

J R was all smiles when I met him. He had been informed by Meniks that I was prepared to chuck up the regional directorship and come in as a permanent secretary in his administration. He made an offer of one of the four positions. He inquired which I would like best. The options were defence, public administration, plantation industries and agriculture. I thought for a while and said that the only one of the subjects I really knew anything about was public administration, which was coupled with home affairs at the time, and said I might be able to do something worthwhile there. About defence, I certainly didn’t want to take that, because I would find it very difficult to suggest that the government go to war at any time against anybody.

J R countered with asking whether I knew anything about plantation industries. I ruefully said ‘no’, that my only acquaintance with tea, was spending delightful holidays with my younger brother Peter, who was a planter up-country. J R then surprised me by saying, “Aha! then that is exactly what you must do plantation industries.”

He explained that the state was now the owner of hundreds of thousands of acres of tea, rubber and coconut plantations, taken over by the last government under Land Reform, and that everything was in a dreadful mess. He wanted somebody who knew nothing of the subject to start with a fresh mind and bring about some order. He said that I would have one of the finest gentlemen to work with as minister, M D H Jayawardena.

M D H knew quite a lot about plantations, having owned `estates’ himself. He had been an excellent minister of finance in an earlier Cabinet and knew the ropes of government. He was very quick with papers and short in discussion. It was a delight working with him.

I decided that to learn about plantations, one would have to actually go on to the estates and see what was happening. This gave me the opportunity of many visits to the tea and rubber growing areas. I loved going up-country and making a string of acquaintances in the planting industry. They were all experts at their job and generous in passing on their knowledge.

The new technology introduced to the factory was not only interesting but had the most suggestive names. I soon became familiar with ‘fluid bed dryers’ and ‘vibrating tea sifters’. The Tea Research Institute at Talawakelle like the Rubber Research at Agalawatte was full of information. It was the time of transition in tea planting from ‘seedling’ tea, to VP (vegetatively propagated) tea. It was VP that was giving a new beauty to the many shades of unbroken green hillside that greeted the driver as he rounded the bends in the tea country. Some of the innovative ideas of the planters like the cutting down of shade trees were bearing fruit. But this question of whether to cut or not to cut, was giving rise to controversy and some of the older ones favoured leaving the trees standing for shade.

The ‘planter language’ was also something one had to get used to. The main road was the ‘cart road’. You do not ‘pick’ tea, but ‘plucked’ it. In a Tea Research Institute instruction booklet I was confounded by the phrase ‘manual defoliation’. On seeking an explanation, I was told that this meant ‘Plucking’. Planters did not go ‘on leave’; they took ‘furlough’. Much of the planting fraternity culture had grown around English or rather Scottish custom and usage, and the habits persisted long after the Scots had left. Short trousers with stockings and green garters appeared to be the proper dress for the field, with the ‘polo’ hat to match. Only a kangani would use a black umbrella to ward off the heat of the tropical sun.

The club, after the day’s work, was a favoured retreat, and cream or grey flannel trousers and tweed jackets were part of the strict dress code. Entertaining each other, or visitors from Colombo, who seemed to be always welcome, was a regular occurrence. These were occasions for lavish hospitality and fun until the JVP incursions into the estates in the early seventies and their menacing ‘chits’ put the brake on this high-profile lifestyle.

I began to get very interested in the social condition of the labour and life in the line-rooms. The birth rate on the estates was much higher than the national average and so were maternal and infant mortality. Family planning had been popular at one time through the mobile clinics which had offered female sterilization. This had been by far the most popular method, but now abortion seemed to be the choice of the women workers. Women made up the major part of the workforce and there seemed to be a surplus of men lounging around and getting drunk in the evenings. As productivity on the field increased, and more sophisticated machines were brought into the factory, unemployment grew.

There were many things to be done in improving the levels of health and education. But equally important appeared to be the elimination of the disparities between life on the estate and life in the neighbouring village. I thought much of the tension was on account of this. Estate people spoke Tamil and the villagers Sinhalese. Estate people earned regular incomes. The villager subsisted on whatever crop they grew and the hire of irregular labour. The villagers were citizens of the country and voted. On the estates many were non-citizens and did not have the right to vote. The estate worker lived in a line-room which he did not own. The villagers had land and a home.

These differences were separating the groups and creating potential zones of bitterness and future strife. I worked with the minister on what we called estate-village integration. We thought out and put into practice, through the estate managers, some innovative ways of bringing people together.

The ministry of plantation industry’s mandate did not end with looking over the management of the huge national asset which had now become the responsibility of the state. This in itself was a large enough responsibility to occupy all the time of the minister and his staff. In addition was the responsibility of working in the international arena to obtain remunerative prices for tea, rubber, and coconut products.

I found this aspect of my work very exciting. It took me on several missions to Rome where FAO is located, and Geneva where UNCTAD was most prominent through the exertions of a fellow Sri Lankan and old friend, Gamani Corea, who was secretary general of the organization at the time.

Sri Lanka as the leading tea exporter of the world – the country exports almost 95 per cent of its production – had a big role to play in the international discussions, as part of the group of producer countries, along with our competitors – India and Kenya. I found myself in the forefront of lobbying for better prices for tea in the world markets.

We had some powerful delegations from the tea consuming countries, notably the United States and Britain who felt that the price the producer got for its tea – the cheapest drink in the world – was good enough. We became firm friends at work but were often locked in bitter debate on the many issues surrounding commodity prices.

On the technical side, I used to have quality support from Mahinda Dunuwila, then executive director of the Ceylon Tea Board and T Sambasivam his deputy. On the marketing side, Leelananda De Silva, an economist who came in to the ministry as an additional secretary made extremely able presentations in the working groups. I recall chairing many plenary sessions. Sitting alongside were helpful advisors from UNCTAD – many of them, like us were from the developing countries. I found that we had many friends and could easily win on the voting, if ever it got to that, but that the other side, the developed countries were better prepared in the arguments and had obviously done their homework more thoroughly.

OPEC and what the developing countries had done to obtain higher prices for oil in the 1970s made some of us think of the possibilities of buffer-stocking for tea. Unfortunately, the extreme rivalry for short-term gain which we had from our erstwhile colleagues, especially India and Kenya who worked to maximize production at all times, did not make it likely that the prospect for buffer-stocking arrangements would ever materialize.

All of our effort to obtain a better price for our tea at the auctions, either in Colombo or in London, was to pass it on to the producer so that he could optimize his profit and gain something more than his costs of production and so that the surplus could be used for investing on machinery, in the field or on the welfare for the worker like improving the housing. This was obviously what would have happened in the days the estates were privately owned.

However now that the estates had been nationalized and belonged to the state, the treasury had an eye on the profits, if any, and would seek to capture as much of it through the export tax on tea. Trying to cure this and opposing the treasury on the increase in export duty had the unfortunate effect of costing M D H his portfolio. When the 1978 budget attempted to do just this – increase the duty – M D H lost his cool and attacked the Minister of Finance Ronnie de Mel and his short sighted policy during the debate on the budget. Ronnie complained, J R was embarrassed and had to ask good old M D H to tender his resignation.

I remember him coming back to office that morning, admitting that he had erred in attacking Ronnie’s policy on the floor of the House and bidding me goodbye with tears in his eyes. I thought he never recovered from this lapse, for soon after he had a stroke which left him paralyzed and helpless. He died a few months later and I was deeply saddened at the downfall of this man of quite exceptionable nobility. They don’t make them like that any more.

It was about this time, with Montague Jayewickreme taking over the ministry of plantations and things getting rather unsettled there, that Premadasa, then prime minister, who was looking for a secretary telephoned to ask whether I would come over to work for him. I think he had seen me at work with Dudley in the 1965-70 period and had perhaps felt that I would be useful. His own secretary Eardley Goonewardene, who had been with him from his local government days had fallen sick and wished to retire and the position was open. By now I had done the job six times already with five different PMs but felt that considering Premadasa’s energy and unothodox ways it would be an experience with a difference. As it turned out, it was quite something.

(Excerpted from Rendering Unto Caesar by Bradman Weerakoon)

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Features

Eastern University and the making of a culture of peace

Published

7 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Jehan Perera

There is an important change in the way peace is being understood in Sri Lanka. The notion that peacebuilding is not simply the responsibility of governments, politicians and peace organisations, but is also a responsibility of educational institutions, appears to be permeating the consciousness of at least a section of the academic community. This was visible on International Peace Day at an event held at Eastern University by the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences. The event was unusual not least because the medical and nursing faculty of the university had decided that peacebuilding was relevant to its academic and professional responsibilities.

Peacebuilding has too often been treated as something undertaken after conflict, when the fighting has stopped and the immediate task is to rebuild relationships between communities. But peace cannot be sustained by governments and peace organisations alone. If it is to become long lasting, the values and practices of peace have to become part of the institutions through which a society educates its younger generations. Universities and other educational institutions are therefore important to peacebuilding. They are among the places where the foundations of a culture of peace can either be built or neglected.

The experience of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University provides a practical example of what this can mean. Led by its Dean, Prof Thillainathan Sathaananthan, the faculty organised an event which went beyond the ordinary academic scope of a medical faculty. University academics are experts in writing project proposals and applying for research grants. On this occasion, the members of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences used those skills to apply for a UNESCO grant that they won to conduct an International Peace Day event. The significance lies less in the Rs 200,000 grant than in the decision to use the university’s institutional capacity and resources to invest in peacebuilding. The event at Eastern University needs to be understood as more than a successful university programme. It represents a possible paradigm shift in peace thinking.

Institutional Commitment

The Peace Day event obtained the support of the university administration, including Vice Chancellor Prof P Peratheepan, and reached out to secondary schools in the vicinity to mobilise their attendance. The event itself was meticulously organised. There were cultural items including traditional and modern dance and song in the three languages, performed by combinations of solo, duet and multiple singers, dancers and actors drawn in part from nearby secondary schools. There was a panel discussion by senior academics on the general theme of peacebuilding and how to prepare for it. A discussion among the students followed, where each student spoke on behalf of a religion that was not theirs. This is significant because peacebuilding cannot remain an idea discussed by specialists at conferences. It has to become part of the way institutions educate and prepare people for life in a plural society.

The Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University has provided a model through its Peace Medicine course modules that were introduced to the curricular as a compulsory core course over 10 years ago. Two senior academics, Dr Kuveriel Eliyas Karunakaran and Dr Thillainathan Sathaananthan, have written a book on “Peace Medicine- A Health Care Concern” that was published five years ago. Its Peace Medicine Module integrates principles of medical ethics, compassion, equity, social justice and community engagement into health education and practice. In his introduction, former Vice Chancellor of Eastern University, Prof T Jayasingam noted “This book is an introduction to a theme which had already been operating in the Faculty of Health Care Sciences as a course.”

Doctors, nurses and health workers know better than anyone the harm that war and violence does. They are the people who treat the wounds and trauma that violence leaves behind. In a hospital, a patient is not asked what their religion or ethnicity is before they are treated. Health care is one of the places where peace is practised every day. The Faculty has therefore found a way of connecting its professional responsibilities with the wider social responsibility of peacebuilding. The question is whether this experience can be replicated throughout the country, at universities and at other educational institutions, so that peacebuilding becomes part of the consciousness of education itself. If that happens on a sufficient scale, it can begin to generate a culture of peace that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

Local Action

The Eastern University event corresponded closely to the United Nations theme for this year’s International Day of Peace, “Invest in Peace – For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day”, which honours the “everyday architects of peace”, people driving local action, laying the groundwork for stability and building lasting peace from the ground up. The emphasis on investment is important. An investment means that something is put in: time, courage and resources. There is no more violent conflict in Sri Lanka today. But the absence of war does not automatically produce a culture of peace. The factors that fed the country’s conflict have not disappeared from the world. Racism, corruption and the violation of laws and human rights are the raw materials of conflict. So too are unresolved grievances, discrimination and the failure to recognise the suffering of others.

A country that does not deal with its past does not escape it. The past can return in the next generation. This is why the experience of Eastern University needs to be replicated countrywide, both at universities and at other educational institutions. The objective should not be to turn every academic discipline into peace studies. Rather, peacebuilding needs to become part of the consciousness of education itself. Eastern University shows that a medical faculty can develop Peace Medicine. A law faculty can examine the relationship between justice, rights and peace. Faculties of education can prepare teachers to work in diverse communities, while the humanities and social sciences can examine the different narratives through which communities understand their histories. Every institution can find its own way of making peacebuilding relevant to what it teaches.

Sri Lanka has had many declarations, pledges and programmes in the past. What matters is whether these produce changes in behaviour and institutional practice. Peacebuilding requires confronting difficult issues rather than avoiding them. It requires respect for different identities, but also engagement across those identities. It requires dealing with grievances in the present while also addressing unresolved issues from the past. It requires truth, accountability, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence. It requires people to learn that the rights of another community do not diminish their own rights. The International Peace Day event at Eastern University was evidence of a change in the way at least some academics in a part of the country deeply affected by war are thinking about their responsibilities. Peace needs to be invested in and the most important investment will be in the minds of those who will inherit the future.

Features

Quality assured education commodities

Published

7 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Ahilan Kadirgamar

I have always noticed the little paper tags that are inside the packaging of some products that say quality assured or quality control. I often wonder who might have checked the product and stamped that tag, but I also forget the tag soon enough. Decades later, when I entered academia, I was taken aback by the emphasis placed on quality assurance in our universities. It is not something that could be forgotten and done away with; the entire university system is obsessed with quality assurance.

Beginning with the staff induction programme, quality assurance is drilled into the newly recruited lecturers. It is the norm, not seen as doing any harm and only trying to improve quality. It is accepted as given, and not questioned. Quality Assurance Cells and Committees are omnipresent and hover above the Departments and, at times, even the Faculty Boards. Quality Assurance reviews are feared by the Deans and Vice Chancellors. University life itself seems secondary to the rule of quality assurance. What do we make of this system of quality assurance and what are its implications for our university system?

Corporate speak

Universities globally have been going through major changes with neoliberal education policies. In many countries, universities increasingly became corporatised to be run like businesses in the 1980s. As state support for universities declined, cost cutting became the norm. They started hiring adjunct or part-time staff. Many public non-fee levying universities around the world began to charge fees. Decade by decade, tuition fees became more and more exorbitant, forcing students to take student loans. The total student debt in the United States now stands at close to US$ 2 trillion; which is about 20 times the GDP of Sri Lanka. As the higher education landscape transformed in the West, university administrations began to recruit Presidents, Vice Chancellors and administrative officials with corporate backgrounds and experience.

Such corporatisation of universities in the West has since been imported into countries like Sri Lanka, introducing a new corporate vocabulary, including quality assurance, graduate competencies, programme outcomes, intended learning outcomes, etc. University teaching has become secondary to documenting so-called outcomes. The teacher-student relationship, the environment of the lecture hall and even administering the university have been over-determined by the processes of ensuring quality. How did such major changes come about in such a short time? Indeed, academics of just two generation ago, would never have heard of these terms and processes in the Sri Lankan university system.

World Bank Trojan horse

Since the early 2000s there have been a number of World Bank projects that have drastically changed the character of Sri Lankan universities. Quality assurance as a central agenda within universities, and many other changes to the working of our universities, came through these World Bank initiatives. The Improving Relevance and Quality of Undergraduate Education (IRQUE) project and Higher Education for the 21st Century (HETC) project were two such earlier projects that set up the Quality Assurance and Accreditation Unit (QAAU) under the University Grants Commission (UGC) and established systematic quality assurance reviews for state universities. The public often thinks these are grants from the World Bank to modernise our universities. However, they are not grants but loans.

The most recent such project, Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) is a US$ 100 million loan from the World Bank implemented from 2018 to 2023, which consolidated the quality assurance structures from the earlier projects. Furthermore, these projects are implemented with tremendous arrogance, prioritising their implementation over all other concerns in the universities, when the project over six years for example accounts for just one fourth of our budget allocation for universities this year.

The AHEAD project drastically changed course curricula, sought to increase student enrolment in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) disciplines, commercialise the university research agenda and create university-business linkages. All of this was pushed to supposedly help us face development challenges. We have heard the ideological attack on our universities and even students claiming they are “unemployable graduates”. These changes to our higher education system were supposedly going to create jobs and increase employment.

The irony of the AHEAD project is that just as it was ending in 2023, apparently after having reached its targets, the Sri Lankan economy was collapsing. The World Bank often gets the direction of causality wrong. It is the economy that creates jobs for graduates, and not the training or kind of graduates that create jobs. It is decades of World Bank policies, and those of its ideological twin the IMF, that have led to such high youth unemployment, not only in Sri Lanka but also in many other countries in the global South.

Sri Lanka entered an IMF agreement in March 2023 and started a new Country Partnership Framework with the World Bank in June 2023. These programmes have little to say about, and actively discourage, government initiatives that aim to create an industrial policy or an employment creation policy. Instead, they push for austerity measures, which not only restrict the allocation for education among other sectors, but also end up contracting the economy to the detriment of increasing employment. Their goal is the commercialisation of higher education, to make universities into businesses and run them like factories.

In this context, the ideology of quality assurance is powerful. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), whose different standards are necessary for marketing, is the institution that came up with the concept of “quality assurance”. It promoted quality assurance as a process of identifying defected products. Therefore, when the World Bank promotes this conceptual framing, our students are, in fact, seen as products on the assembly line, with quality assurance processes aiming to prevent the release of defected products from the university system. For the US$ 100 million we borrowed for the AHEAD project and the many more million dollars in similar World Bank projects, there is no evidence of increased employment of graduates.

Commodity fetishism

Over a century and a half ago, Karl Marx critiqued the economic analysis prevalent at that time that associated some inherent or monetary value for commodities without considering the social relations that underlie the production of those commodities. Marx called this commodity fetishism. Furthermore, he theorised that such commodity fetishism was also a reason for the alienation of human beings from the world. If our labour and what we produce is seen devoid of the social relations that underlie them, we lose our connection with the people and the world. In this process we become alienated from what we produce and the world.

We are now in a world where our students themselves are fetishised as commodities for the market. Universities are no longer communities concerned about knowledge and human growth, but mere factories producing commodities, which have to be produced without defects to be marketed. In this way, quality assurance has become the cause for the alienation of students, academics and our universities themselves, from the larger relationship with our economy and society.

Our university system does need reform. It is grossly underfunded and not providing the financial support and facilities for our students. Universities have become hierarchical spaces without the academic freedom and democratic ethos necessary for producing knowledge. Academics and students need to engage more with their communities to make their learning and research meaningful, not to mention their contribution to and integration with society. However, when it comes to even questions of governance and regulation of the universities, such concerns are merely reduced to improving quality. In our contemporary times, this singular focus on quality assurance, as opposed to addressing the larger structural issues, is crippling our universities. There may be no way out, but to put back quality assurance where it started, those little tags on goods, to perhaps be noticed but quickly forgotten.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economist and Senior Lecturer, University of Jaffna.

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

Features

Thailand’s biggest new global star …

Published

7 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

The entertainment scene, globally, is agog with excitement, and, why not!

Yes, a new global star has emerged … from Thailand, and she hit the headlines by winning America’s Got Talent.

Rattikarn Amloy, known to millions by her stage name Nene Royal, was crowned the winner of America’s Got Talent (AGT) Season 21 at the live finale at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, California, taking home the USD 1 million grand prize.

The 16-year-old rocker, from the holiday island of Phuket (I’ve been to Phuket, courtesy Tourism Authority of Thailand), has struck a power chord around the world, and is the first Thai national ever to win the hit NBC show.

She beat nine other finalists, including runner-up magician Geno Ploeger, after a blistering final performance.

Nene’s story is pure rock and roll fairy-tale. She says she picked up a guitar at age seven, fell in love at the first chord, and taught herself mostly by watching videos online. That dedication earned her a music scholarship to Kajonkiet International School Phuket.

Her audition at America’s Got Talent — a swaggering, shredding rendition of The Cranberries’ classic ‘Zombie’ — exploded online, amassing over 200 million views across AGT’s platforms, more than any act this season.

She kept wowing: ‘Hysteria’ by Muse, then ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden which earned her Spice Girl Mel B’s Golden Buzzer, sending her straight to the live shows.

For the final, she unleashed ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes. Judge Howie Mandel shouted: “You should win. Give her the million, America.” Mel B praised her “mysterious, mystical stage presence”.

And for the grand finale, she lived every teen rocker’s dream — performing on stage, alongside US rock giants Linkin Park.

When host Terry Crews announced her as winner, the teenager collapsed to the stage floor in tears. “I’m very happy and you know I’m emotional right now,” she said.

And Thailand erupted. Her school held watch parties, posting: “You did it, congratulations, champion. We are so proud of you.”

Even Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul sent a personal congratulation. He had earlier hosted Nene at Government House in July, where she played guitar while he sang a Thai rock song. His office said her talent “brought pride to Thai people.”

Corporate Thailand also rallied behind her — Charoen Pokphand Foods, owned by billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, even rented a giant billboard in Times Square, New York, to cheer her on.

With her blistering guitar solos, rock-ballad shrieks and fearless spirit, little Nene Royal has just become Thailand’s biggest new global star.

What’s more, this amazing teenager will be bringing her powerful vocals, guitar skills and signature rock-metal style to the stage, as opening act, before one of the world’s biggest rock bands, America’s Avenged Sevenfold, in Singapore, on 13 October.

Unfortunately, we are still to see a local artiste, grab the spotlight, on a global scale … like Thailand’s Nene.

Yes, they do shine, but mostly on social media, and that, too, with the aid of AI (Artificial Intellegence).