Features

It’s Time to Bust the Myth That Endless Economic Growth Is Good for Us!

Published

5 years ago

2021/05/30

Sahan Weerasooriya

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” — Edward Abbey

by Selvam Canagaratna

Robert R. Raymond, writing in Truthout magazine on May 21 noted that in order to maintain the endless expansion and infinite growth that capitalist economies require, our economy demands ever increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption. In fact, economists and politicians generally believe that , meaning that the economy needs to double every 20 years — that’s twice as much of everything 20 years from NOW — and then twice as much as that 20 years later!

It’s not hard to see how this kind of exponential, infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet — and it’s no surprise that we’re seeing ecosystems collapse. However, it’s not just an environmental concern. In his latest book, Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, ecological economist Tim Jackson explores how the ideology of growth permeates our minds and our societal institutions in insidious ways which end up making us miserable.

Truthout

spoke with Jackson about why this ideology is so pernicious, why it is holding us back from truly flourishing as a species, and what a post-growth world might look like.

Raymond:

To start, I’m wondering if you could lay out the main arguments you write about in your book.

Tim Jackson:

The main argument in the book is that a world after growth and after capitalism could be a richer place. In some sense, both growth and capitalism, although they’ve contributed to progress, have also swindled us. They’ve sold us a false dream about what progress means and even about what human satisfaction means. And in locking us into an iron cage of consumerism, they’ve prevented us from seeing the depths of the human spirit and the possibilities for human fulfillment and for human progress.

One of the main points I wanted to make is the idea of limits — the idea that growth in the conventional sense is limited and the planet is limited — and turn that idea on its head and say that you [can] think of limits not as a constraint, not as a prison that keeps all of our possibilities limited to the amount of materials or the amount of money that we have or the possibilities for expansion of the economy, but actually as an idea of a doorway, a gateway to a different world.

We should think of limits as teaching us, not about what is bounded, but what is unbounded. Those unbounded parts of our lives, those unbounded possibilities, our endless creativity, our ability always to find places where we can dedicate our energy to human progress, to social connection, to relationship, and to a sense of meaning and purpose. That’s a core idea in the book, that beyond limits lies this expanse where there’s an even deeper fulfillment to be found.

In the book, you describe how our leaders have developed an “allegiance to the great God of Growth.” Can you describe why capitalism is reliant on growth? Is it an essential part of the system? In practical terms, what are some of the consequences of our reliance on infinite growth?

You can think of capitalism broadly as a system that privileges the idea of selfish profit-seeking behaviour at the core of the organization of our economy. And that profit-seeking behaviour is supposed to lead to efficiency — and sometimes does lead to efficiency, and sometimes even benefits society — but it works better in one set of activities than it works in another. It works quite well when you’re talking about the efficiency with which we use materials to build products and then expand our markets to sell them to other people. And the difficulty is that once you’re on that particular path, you’re almost immediately locked into a process that says, “Well, we get more and more efficient and we expand further and we invest our proceeds into technologies which make us more efficient again.”

And you find yourself very quickly in a process in which expansion becomes integral to the system itself.

Where this goes wrong is — apart from the planetary implications of accumulating more and more stuff and building more and more things and consuming more and more products — there’s an inbuilt inequality there because the few people that are able to accumulate, because they own capital resources, can make themselves much richer. But it doesn’t necessarily always trickle down to the poorest in society. And in fact, in the last 40 or 50 years, we’ve actually seen the opposite.

The rich got much richer and the poorest people in society found their wages stagnant, their livelihoods insecure, their work precarious — particularly in advanced economies.

How has COVID informed your understanding of our growth-based economy, and what has it revealed about the shortcomings of our current economic system?

One of the most striking lessons of the pandemic has been that it’s exactly those people, those precarious livelihoods, who turned out to be the most critical when it came to protecting our lives in the face of the coronavirus. That is, the care workers, the nurses, the teachers, the frontline workers, the people who delivered goods and services when we couldn’t get out, the people who cleaned … all of our homes and offices, the people whose livelihoods had been squeezed by. We forgot about the people who just sustained us, the people who nurtured us. So that economy of care was the one that had gone missing over several decades because of the way that capitalism has this locked-in drive towards expansion and profiteering and productivity.

That to me is a deep structural problem in the way that we’ve organized our economies. And we can think about taxes to redistribute the wealth that’s too concentrated, we can think about mechanisms or technologies to change the impact on the climate. But right at the heart of that is this mechanism that systematically demotes the importance of some of the most socially valuable people in our society. And I think that’s the biggest challenge that we have to face as we come out of the pandemic, and as we think about life after the pandemic, and as we think about life after capitalism.

What would a post-growth economy look like, for us in the West, but also for the Global South? There are some on the left who advocate for “growth agnosticism,” which is a stance that acknowledges that some parts of the world still require some form of economic growth. What are your thoughts on that?

I do think it’s important to be a little bit differentiated — there’s no one-size-fits-all vision. And I also happen to believe, and I think the evidence really supports this, that in the poorest places in the world some income growth is essential. When you look at the relationship between income and life expectancy, say, what you find is that as you go from having virtually nothing to around about $15,000 per capita, you get these vast increases in life expectancy and educational participation, you get a vast reduction in infant mortality and maternal morbidity. And even things like happiness increase very quickly from zero income to around about that $15,000 mark.

That’s real evidence that investing in and increasing incomes in the poorest countries is a good thing — there are places where incomes need to rise. And then you look at the data past that $15,000 per capita point across countries and you find a really bizarre phenomenon, which is that the prosperity gains, the gain in life expectancy, for example, the gain in terms of lower infant mortality, those gains really start to tail off, and in some cases, they even go into reverse. So, you get these perverse situations where you have very rich economies like the UK or the US with life expectancies which are lower than in some poorer countries. It points us in the direction of the kind of initiatives that Cuba, Costa Rica or Chile have taken. This data really tells us something critical. It tells us that prosperity — quality of life, life that we have to take and the places where they need to be taken.

It goes together with this idea, which is another core idea in the book, about balance. When you have a deficiency of something, then having a bit more of that makes sense. Growth makes sense. When you have an excess of something, having more of it actually takes you into a worse position. And the problem with capitalism is we tend not to see where that point of balance lies, we tend to miss it because it’s continually driving forward, continually expanding, continually lionizing the idea of more — when sometimes less is what’s needed.

We’ve been talking about a lot of really big concepts — a lot of interesting ideas of where we could go as a society and a lot of the challenges and difficulties that exist right now in the way that we’ve organized our economic systems. But to zoom in a little bit, what are some of the practical paths forward in order to begin moving towards that balance you’re talking about?

In my last book, Prosperity Without Growth, I presented a threefold distillation of this. First, establish the limits, because it’s the limits that tell you how you can afford to live. So we must make clear what the limits are: like the emission pathways that will lead us to a safe place in relation to climate, the limits of how much oil or gas we can afford to dig out of the ground, the limits around material implications of our lives, or how much can we afford to put into the ocean. We have to make those limits part of our accounting processes so that we can see the natural frame within which we live.

And then there is my second main theme which is to fix the economics, because the economics are profoundly broken in exactly that sense that we were talking about before. That, for example, the most important people in society are very poorly rewarded and mistreated by capitalism. And so, the economics that says that a financial sector worker deserves 1,000 times the income level of someone who is saving lives on the front line of the pandemic, is broken.

So, putting in place mechanisms that guarantee the basic services that we need in society, like health and education, putting in mechanisms that pay people decent salaries, putting in place mechanisms that perhaps provide, as we did in some countries during the pandemic, a kind of basic income that allows people to actually undertake care work in the home — unpaid work, that contributes massively to society. There are so many different ways of reconfiguring our economic incentives and they have to play a part in how we make this transition.

And then my third strand is to change the social logic. We live in a logic that dysfunctionally encourages us into endless anxiety in order to promote the sense that we are only complete if we go out shopping, if we consume, and that our only satisfactions are to be had through that role in society. It’s a poor understanding of our psychology. We deliberately inculcated it — we’ve encouraged that view of ourselves in order to have the people that we need within the system to [continually] go out shopping so we can continue to make stuff so that we can keep the economy going. [A new] social logic demands that we think differently about who we are; it demands that we reframe our idea of ourselves.

There’s a huge potential lying there waiting for us to lead more satisfying lives, lives of action and creativity and engagement and social concern that are deeply fulfilling and that offer us this space where we are no longer trashing the planet for the sake of the next latest material craze. So, in other words, I’m passionate about this idea that beyond capitalism is a richer world, a more fulfilling world — as well as one that is less damaging to the planet and to other people.

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Features

US-CHINA RIVALRY: Maintaining Sri Lanka’s autonomy

Published

1 day ago

2025/12/19

Thilina Walpola

During a discussion at the Regional Center for Strategic Studies (RCSS) in Sri Lanka on 9 December, Dr. Neil DeVotta, Professor at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, USA commented on the “gravity of a geopolitical contest that has already reshaped global politics and will continue to mould the future. For Sri Lanka – positioned at the heart of the Indian Ocean, economically fragile, and diplomatically exposed- his analysis was neither distant nor abstract. It was a warning of the world taking shape around us” (Ceylon Today, December 14, 2025).

Sri Lanka is known for ignoring warnings as it did with the recent cyclone or security lapses in the past that resulted in terrorist attacks. Professor De Votta’s warning too would most likely be ignored considering the unshakable adherence to Non-Alignment held by past and present experts who have walked the halls of the Foreign Ministry, notwithstanding the global reshaping taking place around us almost daily. In contrast, Professor DeVotta “argued that nonalignment is largely a historical notion. Few countries today are truly non-aligned. Most States claiming neutrality are in practice economically or militarily dependent on one of the great powers. Sri Lanka provides a clear example while it pursues the rhetoric of non-alignment, its reliance on Chinese investments for infrastructure projects has effectively been aligned to Beijing. Non-alignment today is more about perceptions than reality. He stressed that smaller nations must carefully manage perceptions while negotiating real strategic dependencies to maintain flexibility in an increasingly polarised world.” (Ibid).

The latest twist to non-alignment is Balancing. Advocates of such policies are under the delusion that the parties who are being “Balanced” are not perceptive enough to realise that what is going on in reality is that they are being used. Furthermore, if as Professor DeVotta says, it is “more about perception than reality”, would not Balancing strain friendly relationships by its hypocrisy? Instead, the hope for a country like Sri Lanka whose significance of its Strategic Location outweighs its size and uniqueness, is to demonstrate by its acts and deeds that Sri Lanka is perceived globally as being Neutral without partiality to any major powers if it is to maintain its autonomy and ensure its security.

DECLARATION OF NEUTRALITY AS A POLICY

Neutrality as a Foreign Policy was first publicly announced by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa during his acceptance speech in the holy city of Anuradhapura and later during his inauguration of the 8th Parliament on January 3, 2020. Since then Sri Lanka’s Political Establishment has accepted Neutrality as its Foreign Policy judging from statements made by former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena and Foreign Ministers up to the present when President Dissanayake declared during his maiden speech at the UN General Assembly and captured by the Head Line of Daily Mirror of October 1, 2025: “AKD’s neutral, not nonaligned, stance at UNGA”

The front page of the Daily FT (Oct.9, 2024) carries a report titled “Sri Lanka reaffirms neutral diplomacy” The report states: “The Cabinet Spokesman and Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath yesterday assured that Sri Lanka maintains balanced diplomatic relations with all countries, reaffirming its policy of friends of all and enemy of none”. Quoting the Foreign Minister, the report states: “There is no favouritism. We do not consider any country to be special. Whether it is big or small, Sri Lanka maintains diplomatic relations with all countries – China, India, the US, Russia, Cuba, or Vietnam. We have no bias in our approach, he said…”

NEUTRALITY in OPERATION

“Those who are unaware of the full scope and dynamics of the Foreign Policy of Neutrality perceive it as being too weak and lacking in substance to serve the interests of Sri Lanka. In contrast, those who are ardent advocates of Non-Alignment do not realize that its concepts are a collection of principles formulated and adopted only by a group of like-minded States to meet perceived challenges in the context of a bi-polar world. In the absence of such a world order the principles formulated have lost their relevance” (https://island.lk/relevance-of-a neutral-foreign-policy).

“On the other hand, ICRC Publication on Neutrality is recognized Internationally “The sources of the international law of neutrality are customary international law and, for certain questions, international treaties, in particular the Paris Declaration of 1856, the 1907 Hague Convention No. V respecting the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers and Persons in Case of War on Land, the 1907 Hague Convention No. XIII concerning the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers in Naval War, the four 1949 Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I of 1977 (June 2022)” (Ibid).

“A few Key issues addressed in this Publication are: “THE PRINCIPLE OF INVOILABILITY of a Neutral State and THE DUTIES OF NEUTRAL STATES.

“In the process of reaffirming the concept of Neutrality, Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath stated that the Policy of Neutrality would operate in practice in the following manner: “There is no favoritism. We do not consider any country to be special. Whether it is big or small, Sri Lanka maintains diplomatic relations with all countries – China, India, the US, Russia, Cuba or Vietnam. We have no bias in our approach” (The Daily FT, Oct, 9, 2024).

“Essential features of Neutrality, such as inviolability of territory and to be free of the hegemony of power blocks were conveyed by former Foreign Minister Ali Sabry at a forum in Singapore when he stated: “We have always been clear that we are not interested in being an ally of any of these camps. We will be an independent country and work with everyone, but there are conditions. Our land and sea will not be used to threaten anyone else’s security concerns. We will not allow military bases to be built here. We will not be a pawn in their game. We do not want geopolitical games playing out in our neighbourhood, and affecting us. We are very interested in de-escalating tensions. What we could do is have strategic autonomy, negotiate with everyone as sovereign equals, strategically use completion to our advantage” (the daily morning, July 17, 2024)

In addition to the concepts and expectations of a Neutral State cited above, “the Principle of Inviolability of territory and formal position taken by a State as an integral part of ‘Principles and Duties of a Neutral State’ which is not participating in an armed conflict or which does not want to become involved” enabled Sri Lanka not to get involved in the recent Military exchanges between India and Pakistan.

However, there is a strong possibility for the US–China Rivalry to manifest itself engulfing India as well regarding resources in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While China has already made attempts to conduct research activities in and around Sri Lanka, objections raised by India have caused Sri Lanka to adopt measures to curtail Chinese activities presumably for the present. The report that the US and India are interested in conducting hydrographic surveys is bound to revive Chinese interests. In the light of such developments it is best that Sri Lanka conveys well in advance that its Policy of Neutrality requires Sri Lanka to prevent Exploration or Exploitation within its Exclusive Economic Zone under the principle of the Inviolability of territory by any country.

Another sphere where Sri Lanka’s Policy of Neutrality would be compromised is associated with Infrastructure Development. Such developments are invariably associated with unsolicited offers such as the reported $3.5 Billion offer for a 200,000 Barrels a day Refinery at Hambantota. Such a Project would fortify its presence at Hambantota as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. Such offers if entertained would prompt other Global Powers to submit similar proposals for other locations. Permitting such developments on grounds of “Balancing” would encourage rivalry and seriously threaten Sri Lanka’s independence to exercise its autonomy over its national interests.

What Sri Lanka should explore instead, is to adopt a fresh approach to develop the Infrastructure it needs. This is to first identify the Infrastructure projects it needs, then formulate its broad scope and then call for Expressions of Interest globally and Finance it with Part of the Remittances that Sri Lanka receives annually from its own citizens. In fact, considering the unabated debt that Sri Lanka is in, it is time that Sri Lanka sets up a Development Fund specifically to implement Infrastructure Projects by syphoning part of the Foreign Remittances it receives annually from its citizens . Such an approach means that it would enable Sri Lanka to exercise its autonomy free of debt.

CONCLUSION

The adherents of Non-Alignment as Sri Lanka’s Foreign Policy would not have been pleased to hear Dr. DeVotta argue that “non-alignment is largely a historical notion” during his presentation at the Regional Center for Strategic Studies in Colombo. What is encouraging though is that, despite such “historical notions”, the political establishment, starting with President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and other Presidents, Prime Ministers and Ministers of Foreign Affairs extending up to President AKD at the UNGA and Foreign Affairs Minister, Vijitha Herath, have accepted and endorsed neutrality as its foreign policy. However, this lack of congruence between the experts, some of whom are associated with Government institutions, and the Political Establishment, is detrimental to Sri Lanka’s interests.

If as Professor DeVotta warns, the future Global Order would be fashioned by US – China Rivalry, Sri Lanka has to prepare itself if it is not to become a victim of this escalating Rivalry. Since this Rivalry would engulf India a well when it comes to Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEC), Sri Lanka should declare well in advance that no Exploration or Exploitation would be permitted within its EEC on the principle of inviolability of territory under provisions of Neutrality and the UN adoption of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace.

As a measure of preparedness serious consideration should be given to the recommendation cited above which is to set up a development fund by allocating part of the annual dollar remittances to finance Sri Lanka’s development without depending on foreign direct investments, export-driven strategies or the need to be flexible to negotiate dependencies; A strategy that is in keeping with Sri Lanka’s civilisational values of self-reliance. Judging from the unprecedented devastation recently experienced by Sri Lanka due to lack of preparedness and unheeded warnings, the lesson for the political establishment is to rely on the wisdom and relevance of Self-Reliance to equip Sri Lanka to face the consequences of the US–China rivalry.

by Neville Ladduwahetty ✍️

Features

1132nd RO Water purification plant opened at Mahinda MV, Kauduluwewa

Published

1 day ago

2025/12/19

Thilina Walpola

Sponsors (senior management from M/S Perera and Sons), Principal and SLN officials at Opening of RO Plant

A project sponsored by Perera and Sons (P&S) Company and built by Sri Lanka Navy

Petroleum Terminals Ltd
Former Managing Director Ceylon Petroleum Corporation
Former High Commissioner to Pakistan

When the 1132nd RO plant built by the Navy with funds generously provided by M/S Perera and Sons, Sri Lanka’s iconic, century-old bakery and food service chain, established in 1902, known for its network of outlets, numbering 235, in Sri Lanka. This company, established in 1902 by Philanthropist K. A. Charles Perera, well known for their efforts to help the needy and humble people. Helping people gain access to drinking water is a project launched with the help of this esteemed company.

The opening of an RO plant

The Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) started spreading like a wildfire mainly in North Central, North Western and Eastern provinces. Medical experts are of the view that the main cause of the disease is the use of unsafe water for drinking and cooking. The map shows how the CKD is spreading in Sri Lanka.

School where 1132nd RO plants established by SLN

In 2015, when I was the Commander of the Navy, with our Research and Development Unit of SLN led by a brilliant Marine Engineer who with his expertise and innovative skills brought LTTE Sea Tigers Wing to their knees. The famous remote-controlled explosive-laden Arrow boats to fight LTTE SEA TIGER SUCIDE BOATS menace was his innovation!). Then Captain MCP Dissanayake (2015), came up with the idea of manufacturing low- cost Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Plants. The SLN Research and development team manufactured those plants at a cost of one-tenth of an imported plant.

The writer with his PSO’s daughter

Gaurawa Sasthrawedi Panditha Venerable Devahuwe Wimaladhamma TheroP/Saraswathi Devi Primary School, Ashokarama Maha Viharaya, Navanagara, Medirigiriya

The Navy established FIRST such plant at Kadawatha-Rambawa in Madawachiya Divisional Secretariat area, where the CKD patients were the highest. The Plant was opened on 09 December 2015, on the 65th Anniversary of SLN. It was an extremely proud achievement by SLN

Areas where the RO plants are located

First, the plants were sponsored by officers and sailors of the Sri Lanka Navy, from a Social Responsibility Fund established, with officers and sailors contributing Rs 30 each from their salaries every month. This money Rs 30 X 50,000 Naval personnel provided us sufficient funds to build one plant every month.

Observing great work done by SLN, then President Maithripala Sirisena established a Presidential Task Force on eradicating CKD and funding was no issue to the SLN. We developed a factory line at our R and D unit at Welisara and established RO plants at double-quick time. Various companies/ organisations and individuals also funded the project. Project has been on for the last ten years under six Navy Commanders after me, namely Admiral Travis Sinniah, Admiral Sirimevan Ranasinghe, Admiral Piyal de Silva, Admiral Nishantha Ulugetenna, Admiral Priyantha Perera and present Navy Commander Vice Admiral Kanchana Banagoda.

Each plant is capable of producing up to 10,000 litres of clean drinking water a day. This means a staggering 11.32 million litres of clean drinking water every day!

The map indicates the locations of these 1132 plants.

Well done, Navy!

On the occasion of its 75th Anniversary celebrations, which fell on 09 December 2025, the Navy received the biggest honour. Venerable Thero (Venerable Dewahuwe Wimalarathana Thero, Principal of Saraswathi Devi Primary Pirivena in Medirigiriya) who delivered the sermons during opening of 1132nd RO plant, said, “Ten years ago, out of 100 funerals I attended; more than 80 were of those who died of CKD! Today, thanks to the RO plants established by the Navy, including one at my temple also, hardly any death happens in our village due to CKD! Could there be a greater honour?

Features

Poltergeist of Universities Act

Published

1 day ago

2025/12/19

Thilina Walpola

The Universities Act is back in the news – this time with the present government’s attempt to reform it through a proposed amendment (November 2025) presented by the Minister of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education, Harini Amarasuriya, who herself is a former academic and trade unionist. The first reading of the proposed amendment has already taken place with little debate and without much attention either from the public or the university community. By all counts, the parliament and powers across political divisions seem nonchalant about the relative silence in which this amendment is making its way through the process, indicative of how low higher education has fallen among its stakeholders.

The Universities Act No. 16 of 1978 under which Sri Lankan universities are managed has generated debate, though not always loud, ever since its empowerment. Increasing politicisation of decision making in and about universities due to the deterioration of the conduct of the University Grants Commission (UGC) has been a central concern of those within the university system and without. This politicisation has been particularly acute in recent decades either as a direct result of some of the provisions in the Universities Act or the problematic interpretation of these. There has never been any doubt that the Act needs serious reform – if not a complete overhaul – to make universities more open, reflective, and productive spaces while also becoming the conscience of the nation rather than timid wastelands typified by the state of some universities and some programs.

But given the Minister’s background in what is often called progressive politics in Sri Lanka, why are many colleagues in the university system, including her own former colleagues and friends, so agitated by the present proposed amendment? The anxiety expressed by academics stem from two sources. The first concern is the presentation of the proposed amendment to parliament with no prior consultative process with academics or representative bodies on its content, and the possible urgency with which it will get pushed through parliament (if a second reading takes place as per the regular procedure) in the midst of a national crisis. The second is the content itself.

Appointment of Deans

Let me take the second point first. When it comes to the selection of deans, the existing Act states that a dean will be selected from among a faculty’s own who are heads of department. The provision was crafted this way based on the logic that a serving head of department would have administrative experience and connections that would help run a faculty in an efficient manner. Irrespective of how this worked in practice, the idea behind has merit.

By contrast, the proposed amendment suggests that a dean will be elected by the faculty from among its senior professors, professors, associate professors and senior lecturers (Grade I). In other words, a person no longer needs to be a head of department to be considered for election as a dean. While in a sense, this marks a more democratised approach to the selection, it also allows people lacking in experience to be elected by manoeuvring the electoral process within faculties.

In the existing Act, this appointment is made by the vice chancellor once a dean is elected by a given faculty. In the proposed amendment, this responsibility will shift to the university’s governing council. In the existing Act, if a dean is indisposed for a number of reasons, the vice chancellor can appoint an existing head of department to act for the necessary period of time, following on the logic outlined earlier. The new amendment would empower the vice chancellor to appoint another senior professor, professor, associate professor or senior lecturer (Grade I) from the concerned faculty in an acting capacity. Again, this appears to be a positive development.

Appointing Heads of Department

Under the current Act heads of department have been appointed from among professors, associate professors, senior lecturers or lecturers appointed by the Council upon the recommendation of the vice chancellor. The proposed amendment states the head of department should be a senior professor appointed by the Council upon the recommendation of the vice chancellor, and in the absence of a senior professor, other members of the department are to be considered. In the proposed scheme, a head of department can be removed by the Council. According to the existing Act, an acting head of department appointment can be made by the vice chancellor, while the proposed amendment shifts this responsibility to the Council, based upon the recommendation of the vice chancellor.

The amendment further states that no person should be appointed as the head of the same department for more than one term unless all other eligible people have already completed their responsibilities as heads of department. This is actually a positive development given that some individuals have managed to hang on to the head of department post for years, thereby depriving opportunities to other competent colleagues to serve in the post.

Process of amending the Universities Act

The question is, if some of the contents of the proposed amendment are positive developments, as they appear to be, why are academics anxious about its passing in parliament? This brings me to my first point, that is the way in which this amendment is being rushed through by the government. This has been clearly articulated by the Arts Faculty Teachers Association of University of Colombo. In a letter to the Minister of Education dated 9 December 2025, the Association makes two points, which have merit. First, “the bill has been drafted and tabled in Parliament for first reading without a consultative process with academics in state universities, who are this bill’s main stakeholders. We note that while the academic community may agree with its contents, the process is flawed because it is undemocratic and not transparent. There has not been adequate time for deliberation and discussion of details that may make the amendment stronger, especially in the face of the disaster situation of the country.”

Second, “AFTA’s membership also questions the urgency with which the bill is tabled in Parliament, and the subsequent unethical conduct of the UGC in requesting the postponement of dean selections and heads of department appointments in state universities in expectation of the bill’s passing in Parliament.”

These are serious concerns. No one would question the fact that the Universities Act needs to be amended. However, this must necessarily be based on a comprehensive review process. The haste to change only sections pertaining to the selection of deans and heads of department is strange, to say the least, and that too in the midst of dealing with the worst natural calamity the country has faced in living memory. To compound matters, the process also has been fast-tracked thereby compromising on the time made available to academics to make their views be known.

Similarly, the issuing of a letter by the UGC freezing all appointments of deans and heads of department, even though elections and other formalities have been carried out, is a telling instance of the government’s problematic haste and patently undemocratic process. Notably, this action comes from a government whose members, including the Education Minister herself, have stood steadfastly for sensible university reforms, before coming to power. The present process is manoeuvred in such a manner, that the proposed amendment would soon become law in the way the government requires, including all future appointments being made under this new law. Hence, the attempt to halt appointments, which were already in the pipeline, in the interim period.

It is evident that rather than undertake serious university sector reforms, the government is aiming to control universities and thereby their further politicization amenable to the present dispensation. The ostensible democratis0…..ation of the qualified pool of applicants for deanships opens up the possibilities for people lacking experience, but are proximate to the present powers that be, to hold influential positions within the university. The transfer of appointing powers to the Councils indicates the same trend. After all, Councils are partly made up of outsiders to the university, and such individuals, without exception, are political appointees. The likelihood of them adhering to the interests of the government would be very similar to the manner in which some vice chancellors appointed by the President of the country feel obligated to act.

All things considered, particularly the rushed and non-transparent process adopted thus far by the government does not show sincerity towards genuine and much needed university sector reforms. By contrast, it shows a crude intent to control universities at any cost. It is extremely regrettable that the universities in general have not taken a more proactive and principled position towards the content and the process of the proposed amendment. As I have said many times before, whatever ills that have befallen universities so far is the disastrous fallout of compromises of those within made for personal gain and greed, or the abject silence and disinterest of those within. These culprits have abandoned broader institutional development. This appears to be yet another instance of that sad process.

In this context, I have admiration for my former colleagues in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Colombo for having the ethical courage to indicate clearly the fault lines of the proposed amendment and the problems of its process. What they have asked is a postponement of the process giving them time to engage. In this context, it is indeed disappointing to see the needlessly conciliatory tone of the letter to the Education Minister by the Federation of University Teachers Association dated December 5, 2025, which sends the wrong signal.

If this government still believes it is a people’s government, the least it can do is give these academics time to engage with the proposed amendment. After all, many within the academic community helped bring the government to power. If not and if this amendment is rushed through parliament in needless haste, it will create a precedent that signals the way in which the government intends to do business in the future, abusing its parliamentary majority and denting its credibility for good.