Features
From donkeys to tarts, to drafting and drafts
BP Peiris
(Excerpted from Memoirs of a Cabinet Secretary)
(Continued from last week)
Mervyn’s first question on my reporting to him in response to his letter (offering a job in the Legal Dratsman’s Department) was, “Have I taught you at Royal?” Owing to an accumulation of work in his department, he had wanted a draftsman urgently and, as there was no time to call for applications, had gone to Attorney-General Ilangakoon and examined his file of applications for the post of Crown Counsel. He selected T. S. Fernando (at the time of writing, 1967, the Senior Puisne justice).
T. S. could not stand the drudgery and the painful silence of drafting for more than two weeks and asked to be relieved of his duties because he did not find the work congenial. I was then sent for. There was no money in the votes of the Legal Draftsman to pay my salary and I was gazetted as an acting Crown Counsel and paid from the votes of the Attorney-General.
Mervyn Fonseka believed that a classics man made a better draftsman than a mathematics man, a view with which R. B. Naish, a Civil Servant temporarily attached to the department for drafting a new Merchant Shipping Ordinance, and P. C. Villavarayan, a classical scholar from Oxford who was the Senior Assistant Draftsman, agreed. Naish was also a classics man – hence the selection of myself.
Naish was a serious man, intellectual, and very careful and correct in his drafting. Nihal Gunasekera, a charming and cultured man, who had been Crown Counsel and died early after he had reverted to the Bar, told me this story about Naish. There was a case in the Magistrate’s Court of Chilaw which, because of local feeling, the Magistrate was unwilling to hear and the Crown Proctor was unhappy about prosecuting. E. H. T. Gunasekera was asked to prosecute, Nihal was for the defence.
Counsel travelled by train. A white man got into the next compartment. All three got down at Chilaw and went to the rest house. At dinner, the white man sat at a table adjoining that occupied by the two advocates. Naturally, the conversation turned to a discussion of this peculiar silent, white man and in referring to him, the advocates who were speaking in Sinhala, used the would ‘Booruwa’, meaning ‘donkey’.
Next day, when the case was called in court, the ‘donkey’, who had been specially gazetted to try the case, came on the Bench. On the journey back after the day’s work, all three found themselves in the same compartment and E. H. T. tactfully veered the conversation to the subject of languages, Latin and Greek, Sanskrit and Pali, and finally, Sinhala and Tamil. The ‘donkey’ had said that he knew the classical languages and his Sinhala but found Tamil a little difficult. He had added “Some people might think I’m a donkey” and repeated it several times. The donkey was Naish.
Nihal told me of another incident which took place at the Kandy Assizes when he was Crown Counsel prosecuting before Chief Justice MacDonnell, a very polite man who bowed for the slightest thing from the Bench. The case was one of abduction and rape. The “complainant” in the case was the leading prostitute in the town, a woman in the roaring forties with all the hallmarks of her dwindling trade stamped on her person and her features – the enormous hairbun, the bangles on her wrists, the crow’s feet under her eyes, the sallow skin and the powdered face, a woman well known to every individual in the town except Chief Justice MacDonnell.
At the end of the tart’s evidence, the Chief gave a polite bow and said “Thank you, Madam”, which the Interpreter Mudliyar interpreted as “bahapiya”. A literal translation of this word will not convey the Mudaliyar’s meaning to English readers. Freely I would say ‘Get out’. Nihal had pointed out to the Mudaliyar that was not a correct translation of what the judge had said and the Mudaliyar had replied that he had a reputation to maintain in the town.
From donkeys and tarts let me get back to drafting and drafts. My father had often asked me, when I was at the Bar, to call on Mervyn in Chambers, and I had always refused. I preferred to stand on my merits and did not want them to feel that his old pupil, now advocate, was calling on his old teacher, now Head of a Department, to scrounge a favour. Naish told me later that I had been chosen because I had won the George Wille Greek Prose prize in school. I also learned later that the man who had been pressing my case, unasked, with Mervyn was E. H. T. Gunasekera, a fact which he always denied.
After I joined the Department, E. H. T. and I worked in adjoining rooms and we became good friends. I always went to him when I was in need of advice, and he always gave his advice straight from the shoulder, not shaping it to please the other party.
Mervyn was an excellent draftsman, a kind man, but a strict disciplinarian. He insisted on thoroughness and used to stress that a draftsman must know all the law and could not be heard to say that he had made a mistake. He had a fancy for clocks and watches. There were more than a dozen clocks in his house, one showing local time, one Greenwich, one Rome and so on. He also had one of the best collections of classical records, card indexed, and standing on shelves like books.
The Governor, Sir Andrew Caldecott, used to visit him to relax and listen to the records over a whisky and soda. On those days, there was always a policeman at the gate and no one was allowed to enter, neither Mervyn nor Sir Andrew being willing to be disturbed while listening to Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin and other musical celebrities.
He used to have Saturday morning ‘classes’ for his staff officers. He would collect on paper, points that had struck him on our drafts and then we would discuss the several points of law rising on the drafts. These meetings were most helpful to his assistants and we learned a great deal from the discussions. The ‘classes’ were held at 9 a.m. On one occasion H. N. G. Fernando was about two minutes late. As H. N. G. entered the room Mervyn looked at the office clock and told H. N. G. that his watch was not keeping correct time.
H. N. G. was punctual after that. With his interest in clocks, watches, and gramophone records, Mervyn was sometimes a bit absent-minded. He always had a bottle of smelling salts on his table, and one day, absent-mindedly, instead of the bottle, put his fountain pen to his nostril, sniffed, and appeared to have received the same stimulation as if he had smelt the salts.
On October 1, 1936, I was appointed a temporary Assistant Legal Draftsman and made responsible for some of the subsidiary legislation of the island. This included Proclamations, Notices, By-laws of local authorities, Rules, Regulations and Orders – approximately 6,000 for the year. No file was supposed to pass out of the office until Mervyn had run his eyes over the outgoing letter and draft.
Very soon I was in trouble. Drafting is an art which is acquired by experience, and I had no experience at all. I was asked to draft a set of by-laws relating to the traffic lights installed, for the first time, at the Galle Road-Turret Road junction. I looked up the law. The Municipal Councils Ordinance, under which the by-laws were to be drafted, and prepared a set of by-laws using always the word “vehicle”, e.g., the green light means that the vehicle may proceed, the red light means that the vehicle shall stop, adding at the end, a by-law which said that where a vehicle is driven in contravention of the bylaws, the driver of the vehicle shall be guilty of an offence and liable to the prescribed penalty.
My draft passed through the office without Mervyn scrutinizing it. It was approved by the Minister and by the Governor and was, in due course, published in the Gazette and became law. The police then, for a period of about two months, began to instruct motorists in the new rules of traffic control by the use of light signals, after which they started instituting prosecutions.
One day Mervyn phoned me asking me to see him with the Traffic Lights By-laws file. This was unusual, and I knew that I had gone wrong somewhere. I have never, in my life, had such a grilling as I had from him that day. First, he asked me what I had read before I started drafting the by-laws. Did I read the whole of the Municipal Councils Ordinance? This dealt with streets, drainage, markets etc., and I told him that I did not consider it necessary to read the whole of the Ordinance.
After about half an hour of this grilling (I was almost going to call it ‘bullying’ in view of the fact that at some moments I was almost on the point of breaking into tears), he said “Turn to the Interpretation section. Did you read that?” I had not. In that same angry tone, he continued “Read the definition of vehicle”; and like a whipped school boy, I read. ‘Vehicle’ was defined to mean any vehicle other than a mechanically propelled vehicle.
“And,” he continued, after having had a sniff at his bottle of smelling salts, “are you aware of the rule of interpretation that where a word is defined in a statute and that word is used in a by-law made under that statute, then that word had the same meaning as defined in the statute?” Of course, I was not aware. “Well” he finally asked, “What is the effect of your by-laws?” I said I was sorry. I appeared to have caught up every type of vehicle except the motor vehicles. He now spoke in a lower key. To be sorry was one thing. To make him look a fool was an entirely different thing, and he did not want to be made to look a fool. Draftsmen cannot afford to make mistakes etc. etc.
“Lord,” I thought, “will this talking never come to an end?” Suddenly, he was all sweetness. “Don’t misunderstand me. We learn by making mistakes and I have been talking in the privacy of my room. We must put this matter to right.” He spoke in the plural. He phoned the Superintendent of Police dealing with traffic offences and found that there were over 100 cases pending. He told the Superintendent, “All these cases must be withdrawn. I have made a mistake in the drafting and in the circumstances, the Crown does not wish to go on with the prosecution.”
I quickly changed my opinion of the man and thought “What a fine gentleman!” The order for the withdrawal of all the cases had to be given by the Inspector General himself. My mistake (no one knew it was mine) was put right the following week by an amending by-law which said “In these bylaws, ‘Vehicle’ includes a mechanically propelled vehicle.” How simple the whole thing looks now. This happened many years ago. As I type this in 1967, in the privacy of my room, the atmosphere is
heated, my feet are cold and perspiration is pouring down my back.
I had, perforce, to be more careful now. I studied the Draftsman’s Bible, Allison Russell on Legislative Drafting, and if I had the slightest doubt, consulted one of my three seniors, Villavarayan, Wendt or H. N. G., who were always of the greatest assistance. A set of market by-laws for Kurunegala Urban Council was sent to me for revision. The Ordinance gave the Council power to lease the right to collect the rents and fees due in respect of the stalls. Instead of doing this, the Council had leased the entire market to one person and the bylaws were intended to provide for this.
I deleted all the objectionable portions of the draft and returned it to the Council certifying it to be in due form as amended in red ink. After some time, the draft was sent back to me by the Council with an opinion by E. J. Samarawickrema, K. C. stating that the original by-laws were perfectly in order and within the law and requesting that the by-laws as originally sent be certified to be in due form. I could not sit in judgement on my own matter. I accordingly wrote a nine page report to the Legal Draftsman pointing out, with all respect, that Samarawickrema was wrong and that the by-laws as amended by me should stand.
Mervyn sent for me and said, “So. You disagree with Samarawickrema? You had better pass the draft on the K. C.’s opinion.” I requested him to make that order on the file and he hesitated. He then had a conference with the Attorney General, the Solicitor, and five Crown Counsel, with himself, Villavarayan and me for our department and the meeting, after discussion, agreed with me.
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
A wage for housework? India’s sweeping experiment in paying women
Death toll 635 as at 06:00 AM today [09]
Heavy showers above 100 mm are likely at some places in the Northern and Eastern provinces and in Polonnaruwa district
Cyclone Ditwah leaves Sri Lanka’s biodiversity in ruins: Top scientist warns of unseen ecological disaster
Disaster: 635 bodies found so far, 192 listed as missing
More help from Pakistan
‘Dates have the highest sugar content to fight Coronavirus’
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