Features
Cold War to COVAX: New US President rallies allies, but no brave new world in sight
by Rajan Philips
Six months in office, President Biden took his first foreign trip last week, attending the first in-person G7 summit after the pandemic over the weekend, at Carbis Bay in Cornwall, England, and meeting with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday in Geneva. In between, he attended a summit gathering of NATO member country leaders on Monday and met with the European Council on Tuesday. The G7, NATO and the EU meetings became occasions for diplomatic China bashing. And China responded in kind and more, through its Embassies in London and in Europe rather than by the mandarins in Beijing. China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy might be irksome to old school sensibilities, but China seems to be in no hurry to change its modes of diplomacy to please anybody.
Everything is different now from the geopolitics of Cold War. Russia is no longer the West’s main adversary, and capitalism and socialism are not the same weighty words as they once were. Vladimir Putin is, at best, or worst, mostly a significant spoiler. It is China that looms large from the East, pre-occupying western powers, but the terms of engagement now are more competitive and less conflictual. The world is currently without any serious skirmishes, internal or otherwise. There is a lull even in the Middle East, and there are hopes that it might continue with both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump out of power, at least for now. But where violence has receded, the pandemic has taken over. And Cold War politics has given way to vaccine politics.
When history fails to turn
Yet, after much haggling and despite promises to do a lot more, G7 leaders were not able to come up with anything more than one billion vaccine doses when 11 billion of them are needed to immunize the world’s population. Gordon Brown, former British Finance Minister and later Prime Minister, has called the G7 summit another missed opportunity in the history of summits, “another turning point where history failed to turn.” He blamed G7 leaders for their failure to honour the pre-summit promise of Prime Minister Boris Johnson to vaccinate the entire world.
Besides Johnson, more than 100 former world leaders had called on G7 leaders to pledge $44bn of the $66bn needed to vaccinate the world, or eight billion doses and not one billion. A joint Norway-South Africa plan had worked out that eight billion doses donation would involve 27% contribution from the US and 22% contribution from the EU. The current US promise of 500 million doses amounts to 50%, which is a significant share but of the pathetically scaled down one billion promise of the Group of Seven countries. In early May , President Biden announced America’s support for waiving western vaccine patents to facilitate worldwide production and supply of COVID-19 vaccines. His radical turn surprised many, but found no support in G7 and the summit once again “failed to turn.”
Aid and welfare agencies are palpably disappointed with the poor show of vaccine generosity by the wealthiest of the world’s nations, and these civil societies are not likely to be enthused by President Biden’s clarion call for democracies of the world to unite against its autocrats. Nor are other G7 countries entirely enthusiastic about agreeing with the US policy towards China. A number of them do not want to alienate China which they see has a necessary role to play in the global economic recovery after the pandemic. To non-American observers, Biden’s position on China is not very different from that of Trump; what is different is the absence of Trump’s narcissism and racism. And America’s allies, while relieved at the exit of Trump and the entry of Biden, are also unsure that there will not be another political recession in the US similar to what they have had to unexpectedly encounter over the last five years.
Even though China was the main subject at the summit, the final statement reflected a balance between the pushes and pulls between America and its allies. Perhaps the sharpest note in the 70-point G7 statement could be the reopening of the ‘origin’ controversy involving the coronavirus. The summit’s call to make a “science-based” determination of the origins of COVID-19 may have better served its totally legitimate and objective purpose if the call too could have found a science-based origin rather than adversarial politics. Unfortunately, there is no international mechanism to facilitate such a consensus.
As Secretary General António Guterres rued last September marking the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, “the pandemic is a clear test of international cooperation — a test we have essentially failed.” The G7 summit, while it was positively different with Biden displacing Trump as America’s President, came nowhere near to rectifying the failure of international cooperation that the Secretary General was alluding to. There are many things about China that are not at all unexceptionable, but isolating a giant of a country and economic powerhouse is not the way to foster international co-operation, or to determine the truth about the origins of COVID-19.
Two days after G7, NATO got in on the act of targeting China, for first time in its deliberations, and calling China’s actions as a threat to “rules-based international order.” China responded calling NATO to stop “slandering” and to “devote more of its energy to promoting dialogue”. That NATO’s take on China may have been more a manifestation of bureaucratic overreach and not political consensus became evident from the notes of caution that came from the British and French leaders, among others. Prime Minister Boris Johnson asserted that nobody “around the table wants to descend into a new Cold War with China.” France’s Emmanuel Macron had earlier admonished that “China has little to do with the North Atlantic,” while Germany’s Angela Merkel had apparently emphasized that western alliances are “not about being against something, but for something”.
Positive Initiatives
Besides COVID-19, the summit focused on human rights, again targeting China over human rights violations in Xinjiang and in Hong Kong. A somewhat positively competitive response to China was the announcement of a new global infrastructure plan. In an obvious counter to China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, the G7 group at America’s prompting has come up with an initiative of its own, called “Build Back Better World (B3W).”
The new plan is expected to raise about $40 trillion by 2035, and will focus on improving “climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality” conditions in developing countries. By comparison, China’s Belt and Road initiative launched in 2013 is bankrolled solely by China to the tune of $160 billion and is expected to focus more on hard infrastructure projects. The rest of the world can only applaud the two initiatives while hoping that the two promoters will allow other countries to proportionately benefit from both, and not from one or the other.
An even more far reaching summit outcome is the agreement on global corporate taxation. Already in the run-up to the summit, G7 Finance Ministers had reached a deal on (1) source-taxing corporations (i.e., to tax businesses in the countries where they conduct business and earn income); and (2) a global minimum tax proposal of 15% on businesses. The 15% rate is lower than the business tax rate in every G7 country, so this is not a tax increase in those countries. But what it will do is to expose to taxation multinationals and digital companies that now keep running for tax holidays and tax havens. Netherlands, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Ireland are among the more established tax havens, where “phantom investments” flow but no physical manifestations (as in factories, sales, or jobs) are seen. According to the IMF, “phantom investments” account for 40% of the world’s much coveted FDIs (Foreign Direct Investments). Is Sri Lanka’s Port City meant to be a magnet for its miniscule share of phantom investments?
The G7 agreement over global taxation is really the culmination of a much broader effort involving more than 100 countries working over a number of years. And the estimated revenues from global taxation are quite significant – ranging between $250 billion to $600 billion annually. While the G7 agreements is a big step forward, there are obstacles ahead as nothing can be done without the support of everyone. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen mooted the idea for global taxation long before the G7 summit, but it will have to pass muster in the US congress. There is broad support in the EU, but Ireland could be an outlier. The next forum for the global taxation effort will be the gathering of G20 Finance Ministers in Venice in July. Large countries from every continent including China and India will be at the table. Its outcome will offer clues about the pace of global taxation reform.
From Nixon to Biden
The Guardian in one of its editorials last week recalled something that no one in the US or China would seem to have bothered to note so far. It is that next month would be the 50th anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s secret mission to China to prepare the path for President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in February 1972. The visit lasted a week, “the week that changed the world,” as President Nixon famously declared. No one, not even President Biden, is going suggest that the new President’s first week of foreign forays in England and in Europe is going to change the world. But there is no denying the extent to which the world has changed between Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and Biden’s visit to Europe in 2021. It is not that Nixon’s visit changed the world, but only that he seized the opportunity in a world that was already beginning to change.
Henry Kissinger reportedly assured Chinese leaders that “It is the conviction of President Nixon that a strong and developing People’s Republic of China poses no threat to any essential US interest.” Fifty years later, President Biden is calling on democracies to come together against the world’s authoritarian powers, primarily China. In a sense, Biden’s meeting with Russia’s Putin in Geneva last Wednesday caricatures Nixon’s historic visit to China. The summit was a useful necessity even if it was mostly meant for the domestic audiences of the two leaders. Putin wanted to show Russians that under him their country is still a force to reckon with, even though it no longer has the armour of a Soviet Union. For Biden, it yet another demonstration that Trump is gone and America is back. Yet, it was useful that the two leaders have opened a dialogue, which is essential if any headway is to be made, especially in the Middle East.
But it will be paradise lost if America and the West were to fail to open a new dialogue with China without isolating it or ganging up on it. Western leaders made the same mistake after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when they isolated Russia and invited all the former Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO and gang up on Russia. But there is no comparison between Russia without the Soviet Union and 21st century China that is set to surpass the US as the world’s biggest economy in a matter of decades. Yet, there are also growing backlashes against China even as its economic power grows, not only in the West but also in China’s own backyard and wider Asia. The EU, Lithuania and Hungary have recently blocked or put on hold economic partnership prospects with China. On the other side, Australia, South Korea, India, and South Africa are open to aligning themselves with G7 countries. They were all in sidebar attendance at the G7 summit.
If there is paradise to be regained, it can only be through the working of multilateralism. For all its unanticipated problems, the 21st century is remarkable for growing reality of multilateralism in spite of its serious institutional limitations. Beefing up the world’s multilateral institutions should be the first order of business for world leaders in whatever forums they gather. That was not anyone’s agenda at the G7 summit. Nor is it likely to be uppermost in China when it will celebrate, on July 1, the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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
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
Timely and accurate data essential for effective decision making – PM
Bandaranaike Memorial National Foundation donates Rs. 250 million to the Government for national recovery after the emergency situation
Level III landslide warnings issued to the Districts of Kandy, Kegalle, Kurunegala and Matale extended
G.C.E. Advanced Level Examination will resume on 12th January 2026
The aim of the Government is to ensure a safe life for every citizen -President
A wage for housework? India’s sweeping experiment in paying women
‘Dates have the highest sugar content to fight Coronavirus’
Sunday Island 27 December – Headlines
#SundayIsland 17th December – Headlines
Sunday Island – 28th March
Sunday Island Headlines – 21 March
Sunday Island – 21st February – Headlines
-
News7 days ago
Lunuwila tragedy not caused by those videoing Bell 212: SLAF
-
News2 days agoOver 35,000 drug offenders nabbed in 36 days
-
News6 days agoLevel III landslide early warning continue to be in force in the districts of Kandy, Kegalle, Kurunegala and Matale
-
Business4 days agoLOLC Finance Factoring powers business growth
-
News4 days agoCPC delegation meets JVP for talks on disaster response
-
News4 days agoA 6th Year Accolade: The Eternal Opulence of My Fair Lady
-
News2 days agoRising water level in Malwathu Oya triggers alert in Thanthirimale
-
Midweek Review7 days agoHouse erupts over Met Chief’s 12 Nov unheeded warning about cyclone Ditwah