Features

When Passion Became Profession: My Consulting and Training Journey

Published

9 months ago

2025/11/2

Thilina Walpola

LESSONS FROM MY CAREER: SYNTHESISING MANAGEMENT THEORY WITH PRACTICE – PART 25

A Review of the Past

Looking back, I realise how each phase of my career quietly shaped the consultant and trainer I would later become. In my previous articles, I spoke about the lessons I drew from every workplace I passed through — lessons that went far beyond technical knowledge. My journey began humbly at the State Engineering Corporation as a trainee, where curiosity and enthusiasm were my greatest assets. Before long, I found myself entrusted with the Building Research Centre, later known as the National Building Research Organisation. That early responsibility taught me how knowledge and leadership could combine to create impact.

From there, my path took me to the Tyre Corporation as an Industrial Engineer, then to the Sri Lanka Institute of Co-operative Management as General Manager, and later to the Ceylon Ceramics Corporation, again as General Manager. Each move added a new layer of understanding — of people, systems, and how organisations could be guided to perform better. My education in Engineering and Accountancy, complemented by my CIMA and MBA, gave me the frameworks. But it was the experiments, challenges, and day-to-day realities of those workplaces that gave me true insight.

So when I was appointed Chairman of the Employees’ Trust Fund Board at the age of 39, I didn’t feel overwhelmed. Instead, I sensed continuity — as though all my past experiences had prepared me for what lay ahead. The knowledge I had gathered from such diverse environments allowed me to approach problems with a calm sense of foresight. My three-month training in Japan added another dimension, deepening my appreciation of discipline, efficiency, and participative management — lessons that would later influence my consulting style profoundly.

Fate, however, had more lessons in store. The ETF held a substantial shareholding in Dankotuwa Porcelain, a company struggling to survive. Since no other Board member showed much interest, I was nominated to represent the ETF — and soon found myself serving as Chairman there as well. It was an unexpected turn, but one that taught me some of the most powerful lessons of my career: how to manage transformation, build morale, and navigate the complexities of privatisation — one of Sri Lanka’s first at the time. Looking back, that experience was a bridge — from managing organisations to understanding them deeply enough to guide others.

A New Chapter Begins

By 1994, I knew my days as Chairman of the Employees’ Trust Fund Board were numbered. The political winds were shifting — the incumbent government had already lost the Southern Provincial Council, and a change at the top seemed inevitable. I had often been invited to deliver lectures and conduct seminars — usually free of charge — and I realised how much I enjoyed the process of sharing knowledge and motivating others. So, even before the elections, I made up my mind: once my tenure ended, I would take a leap into consultancy and training.

That is how Productivity Techniques (Pvt) Ltd was born — a modest beginning, but one filled with excitement and purpose. When the elections were over and my resignation duly requested, I was already prepared to embark on this new adventure with optimism and energy.

My first series of seminars

Productivity improvement techniques at the enterprise level were one of my pet subjects. I booked a hall at the Colombo Hilton and advertised a seminar on the subject. I was also involved with the Japan-Sri Lanka Technical & Cultural Association (JASTECA) at the same time. I was nominated to attend a seminar in Japan, and left for the seminar after sending out circulars for my seminar. This was the first time Sri Lanka had a seminar of this nature on productivity. While I was in Japan, my wife, who was also a director of the new company and assigned to register participants and related matters, called me and said the registrations are now well over the hall’s capacity. We booked the hall for an extra date two weeks hence and informed the overflow participants. By the time I returned, we had enough participants for three seminars on that single advertisement.

Adapting to Technology

I gradually learned PowerPoint and even bought a digital camera to take pictures for my presentations. I migrated from packages such as WordStar, dBase, and Harvard Graphics to the new Microsoft packages. Although my first productivity seminars used transparent slides on overhead projectors, the latest PowerPoint programme was a hit. Many of the middle-level participants would stare in awe at the colourful slides projected onto the screen. Hitherto, they had only seen transparencies on overhead projectors. Laptops were not standard at the time, and I remember having to cart my desktop and monitor in suitcases to the hotels where I was holding the seminars.

The hotels told me that carrying these suitcases through the lobby was too ugly, and I had to use the service entrance to take them in. It was hard work. My wife handled all the hand-outs, logistics, and registrations. Hardly a participant realised that it was a husband-and-wife operation, and would refer to my wife as “your secretary”, “your girl”, or “your assistant” and so on. I maintained it the same way, being distant while giving her instructions, lest they conclude that my relationship with my “secretary” was a little too intimate.

I recommend to my participants that the most effective way to implement what they learn is to do it the very next day. My lessons were broken into small, manageable chunks. I was mainly teaching practical stuff and very little theory. My recommendations had some effect, as I recall that after one 5S seminar, the Chairman of a group who had sent participants from his garment factory called me to say that, the very next day, these participants were clearing up and arranging the workplace according to 5S principles. He also commented that this was the first seminar his people had attended where they actually implemented what they learned. This boosted my enthusiasm to continue with seminars and consultancy.

The Rise of 5S

To those unfamiliar with “5S”, it is a five-step programme to improve productivity, quality, reduce costs, improve on-time delivery, and improve safety and worker morale. It originated in Japan. It ranges from simple methods to more advanced techniques and could be implemented anywhere, even in homes. It creates a better-organised individual, too. 5S was soon becoming a hit.

I was invited by one of the garment factories in a group with several factories to deliver an in-house seminar on 5S. Fortunately, I made the presentation on PowerPoint. At the end, the CEO told me that their staff were very sophisticated and would not have even bothered to listen to me if I had used the old-fashioned overhead projectors and transparencies. I was invited to many of their other factories, and this group is still one of the best in Sri Lanka for 5S.

A great success was a ceramics ornamental company where I assisted in implementing 5S. In fact, the first sight one encountered upon entering the gate before 5S was the overflowing garbage bin. All these were changed, and the factory looked beautiful and well organised after 5S. A few weeks later, I arrived at a council meeting of the Employer’s Federation when I spotted some of the union leaders from this same factory. They had come to resolve a labour dispute with the management. Despite this issue, as they saw me, they came running up to me. They told me how excellent the factory was now, and that, most of all, they feel so relaxed and less tired compared to the previous scene, when the mess and disorderliness were the first sight in the morning and caused stress and tiredness even before they started work.

At another factory in Biyagama, where I addressed their 3,000 workers on 5S, I got a call from the management representative about three weeks later. He said the workers had implemented many of the 5S elements and, being proud of what they had done, wanted me to come and see their progress. I willingly obliged and noticed their unbelievable enthusiasm. The CEO and the senior management had implemented many novel initiatives to encourage implementation and motivate the staff. Leadership was the key.

Not All Were Successful

Not all my training was successful, though. At one factory in the Panadura industrial zone where I addressed all their staff, I found that many of them had glum faces. Still, I thought some elements of the 5S concepts would sink in. About two months later, the CEO called me and complained that nothing had happened after my training. I asked him what initiatives he took to promote and implement 5S, and he said, “I did nothing. I expected them to implement” I had to advise him politely that the responsibility to implement and make it successful is his, and it is his job to make it happen. He wasn’t very pleased. I suspected it right along when I first saw the glum faces. It wasn’t a very happy workplace. The leadership was poor.

I could see this right at the start from the participants’ faces in some of the places where I undertook training. They all look glum, they never ask questions, and it seems they were brought into the training hall like ‘lambs to slaughter’. It never would take root in such an environment. I could spot the vibrancy in others, how they joke, ask for clarifications, and make comments. The most vibrant organisation I addressed was a multinational, followed by the large garment group.

I was invited to address many elite Colombo schools on 5S, but there were no results. Perhaps it was because the elite schools offered many other sports and extracurricular opportunities and other distractions, and because they came from homes with servants and ayahs, and therefore had a mentality that they have the privilege to be disorganised and messy because 5S would be done by the servants. On the other hand 5S was taken up very well in rural schools an even spread to children’s homes..

Managing Change

I always advocated that the organisation implement a change management process before suddenly calling in an expert for a seminar or training programme. Senior management should paint a future vision for the organisation and surface what is lacking and what needs improvement. The lecture or seminar should be a remedy for the gaps identified, and the staff at every level must be involved in the exercise to implement and achieve the vision.

Many of the organisations I worked with were dynamic, constantly dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, and highly motivated to adopt new concepts and techniques. Some organisations that had tried many western-oriented concepts soon found that, though they were suitable at the strategic level, they failed to impress at the operational level. The Japanese concepts and techniques were not fads but very sound concepts and techniques that could be adapted and adopted after removing the Japanese culture-specific parts, such as lifetime employment and seniority-based promotions, and strengthening the culture-free parts and techniques that fit Sri Lanka’s socio-cultural milieu. Direct transplanting may be a disaster.

Those organisations that succeeded had several common characteristics, such as strong leadership, modern human resource practices, treating employees as partners with brains rather than mere pairs of hands, and respecting employees at all levels. In fact, during a course I followed at the Toyota Institute of Management in Nagoya, the lecturers kept repeating the need to respect employees at every level.

Facing Unethical Practices

I had my share of bad experiences. I had a full repertoire of seminars, ranging from Japanese techniques such as Quality Circles, 5S, Total Productive Maintenance, and Kaizen, to others such as designing Incentive Schemes, Benchmarking, Productivity Techniques, and Ergonomics.

There was one foreign organisation which wanted me to conduct all my seminars within a few months for the benefit of their clientele. Later, I found that it was the idea of their Sri Lankan coordinator. I had no reason to suspect, and besides, I was getting paid. Later, I found that the coordinator had resigned from this organisation, set up his own training outfit, and was conducting seminars on the same subjects using all my content and hand-outs. I had spent years developing these hand-outs, using my personal experiences as examples, too. He had everything tailor-made, copying all my hard work. The worst was when I was conducting a seminar; one participant accused me of plagiarism, and I had no choice but to enlighten him that it was the other way around.

Even if I repeat a seminar a few months later, I always search the internet for new material and new concepts. While perusing the internet one day, I suddenly stumbled across a complete hand-out for my Productivity seminar, including my graphics and images, intact on one of the productivity sites. I recognised the slides at once, but only my name was missing. A well-known consultant had inserted his name after removing mine. I knew him, and he was at that time a consultant to an international organisation too. My initial fury made me prepare a letter to the international organisation. Still, later, I decided to let it pass and drop the matter. I had mentioned this to some of my friends. This hand-out was later removed from the site. Since then, I only provide PDF versions for making copies. It was a shock to learn the hard way that even the so-called respectable trainers would resort to such unethical practices.

Laughter Along the Way

I have had many humorous experiences, which made my lectures even livelier. Addressing a group of plantation managers one day, I explained the first step of 5S: the advanced concept is to reduce working capital, but the simple idea to start with is to reduce clutter and get rid of unwanted items. The first step to calming and relaxing your mind is to have an organised wallet, with only currency bills, arranged in order of denominations, and no unwanted chits or bills. I exhorted the participants to “always keep your wallet clean and organised”, whereupon one participant raised his hand and said, “My wallet is always clean, Mr Wijesinha. My wife cleans it regularly, but there is only one problem, she cleans out the cash and leaves the chits behind”.

At another seminar, I was talking about cleaning of machines and equipment daily and how that concept originated in Japan after World War 2. The war had destroyed most of the factories. When it ended, the Japanese government instructed the factories to preserve the remaining machinery and treat them like family treasures, because the population would otherwise starve. Don’t let there be breakdowns, the instructions said. Their reputation for one of the lowest machine breakdown rates in the world stemmed from this initiative.

The story goes that Japanese factory workers would clean and lubricate the machines, just as they would look after their wives. Some would even go so far as to give the machine the wife’s name and paste it on the machine. Every morning, the operator would worship the machine and look after it with tender loving care. When I told this story, one participant raised his hand and says “I would not encourage it in my factory, sir, because what if the operator has had a fight with the wife in the morning and comes to work furious with the wife, and sees the machine with the wife’s name, I am sure my machine would be in for some rough treatment“. Another participant says he, too, has reservations about this method and explains that if the regular operator is on leave and a relief operator works on the machine, it will be a problem, especially on the night shift when the regular operator would be having nightmares thinking about who is working the machine with his wife’s name on it!

I recall the first “5S” seminar I had at the Hilton. It was attended by many CEOs and other senior executives from the private sector. After the seminar, I was relaxing at home after dinner when the phone rang. It was the wife of a participant. Of course, I knew this family well. She asked me, “My husband came for your seminar today. What on earth did you teach him? Since he arrived home, he has been clearing out the cupboards and throwing out his old clothes, keeping his shoes and slippers in a particular corner. He was such a disorganised man earlier, and now he is totally transformed.

A senior administrator was appointed chairman of a government entity and I was asked to address the staff on 5S which I did. The staff received my lecture well. A week later he called me and said he had been asked to resign by the Minister after a dispute, and then he jokingly said “It’s all your fault. Remember you said the first step is to get rid of unwanted things. The Minister implemented it to the letter and got rid of me“.

I enjoyed my consultancy and training, and I am so proud that these small efforts have spread like wildfire, making many government and private-sector organisations more productive and competitive. Today, 5S is very popular nationwide.

My next episode will feature more stories about how I became involved with the government in its National Productivity drive.

by Sunil G Wijesinha
(Consultant on Productivity and Japanese Management Techniques
Retired Chairman/Director of several Listed and Unlisted companies.
Awardee of the APO Regional Award for promoting Productivity in the Asia Pacific Region
Recipient of the “Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays” from the Government of Japan.
He can be contacted through email at bizex.seminarsandconsulting@gmail.com)

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Features

The Digital Underground

Published

17 hours ago

2026/07/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

Illegal Foreign Exchange, Undiyal, Hawala and Money Laundering, A Four-Part Investigative Series

Forex Platforms, Cryptocurrency, AI and the New Financial Battlefield

THE INVISIBLE FINANCIAL EMPIRE – PART III

The Boyfriend Who Was Never Real

Priya, a 34-year-old professional in Colombo, met “David” on LinkedIn. He claimed to work in fintech in Singapore. For six weeks they exchanged messages daily, about work, about life, about a recent trip he had taken to the Maldives. Eventually, the conversation turned, gently and naturally, to money.

“I’ve been trading on this platform, let me show you,” he said, sharing a screenshot of a sleek trading dashboard showing consistent, impressive returns.

Priya invested a small amount first, $500. Within days, her dashboard showed it had grown to $650. She withdrew $100 successfully, just to test it. It worked. Encouraged, she invested more. Then more. Over two months, she transferred a total of $42,000 into the platform.

When she tried to withdraw her full balance, the platform demanded a “regulatory release fee” of $8,000 before funds could be unlocked. She paid it. Then another fee appeared. Then the platform stopped responding altogether. “David” vanished. The trading dashboard, the customer support chat, the entire brokerage, all of it had never been real.

This is what investigators now call “pig butchering”, and, in 2026, the most disturbing development is not the scam itself, which has existed for years, but what now powers it: artificial intelligence has industrialised the entire operation.

From Manual Fraud to Machine-Generated Deception

For most of the past decade, romance-and-investment scams, like the one that targeted Priya, required enormous manual labour. Scam operations, many of them staffed by trafficked workers held against their will in compounds across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, needed real humans to build relationships with victims over weeks, manage fake trading platforms, and respond convincingly to questions.

That labour-intensive model has now been substantially automated. According to financial-crime researchers tracking this shift through 2026, threat actors are standing up entire AI-generated “brokerage” experiences end-to-end, complete with KYC onboarding, branded customer-service chat, animated portfolio dashboards, and falsified live market data feeds, and operating them at industrial scale against multiple victims simultaneously. Generative-AI relationship managers now front the WhatsApp and Telegram conversations that once required real human scammers. AI-cloned regulator letters are generated on demand to justify the fake “release fees” that drain victims a final time before the platform disappears.

What has changed is not the deception itself, it is the production economics. The cost of running a credible synthetic brokerage against one additional victim has collapsed, meaning a single criminal network can now run hundreds of “Davids” simultaneously, each one indistinguishable from a genuine fintech professional until it is too late. (Figure 01)

Sri Lanka: From Victim Pool to Operating Base

Sri Lanka’s relationship to this global scam economy has shifted in an alarming direction over the past two years. The country is no longer only a source of victims, it has become an operating base for the criminal networks themselves.

In April, 2026, Sri Lankan police raided a five-star hotel property, in Ambakandavila, and arrested 150 individuals, including 133 Chinese nationals, 13 Vietnamese nationals, and one Malaysian national, allegedly running a cyber fraud centre with links to international criminal syndicates, based in Myanmar and Cambodia. Investigators say the operation followed a now-familiar regional pattern: recruiters advertise “online marketing” or “data entry” jobs on social media to lure foreign workers to Sri Lanka, confiscate their passports on arrival, and force them to operate scam campaigns under threat.

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka has formally flagged pig-butchering scams as a “developing threat,” warning that foreign scam networks are increasingly targeting overseas nationals through scam farms operating from Sri Lankan soil. A 2026 United Nations report estimated that at least 300,000 people have been trafficked into scam centres across Southeast Asia.

This is not an abstract international problem. It is unfolding in hotels and rented properties across the country, exploiting the same infrastructure, high-speed internet, affordable accommodation, accessible tourist visas, that Sri Lanka has built to attract legitimate digital businesses and tourists.

Where the Money Actually Goes: The Stablecoin Pipeline

Behind every successful pig-butchering scam sits a laundering pipeline that has been transformed almost as dramatically as the scams themselves, and the transformation has a single dominant feature: stablecoins.

According to the Financial Action Task Force’s March 2026, report, drawing on analysis from blockchain intelligence firms Chainalysis and TRM Labs, stablecoins accounted for 84% of the USD 154 billion in illicit virtual asset transaction volume recorded in 2025, the highest share ever observed, and a dramatic jump from just 15% only a few years earlier. TRM Labs separately found that illicit entities received USD 141 billion in stablecoins, in 2025 alone, the highest level observed in five years. (See Table 01)

The scale of state-level abuse is striking. A Russian sanctions-evasion network built around the ruble-pegged stablecoin A7A5 processed more than USD 72 billion in total volume in 2025.

Fighting Fire with Fire: AI on the Defensive Side

The same artificial intelligence reshaping financial crime is also, out of necessity, reshaping the defence against it. Legacy anti-money laundering systems, built on static, rule-based thresholds, have proven badly outmatched by AI-generated fraud operating at machine speed. Research cited by compliance technology analysts suggests that between 90% and 95% of alerts generated by legacy AML systems are false positives, consuming enormous investigator time while genuinely suspicious activity slips through.

This is not a frictionless transition. AI models are notoriously difficult to explain to regulators and examiners in the way traditional rule-based systems are. The practical compromise emerging across the industry is a hybrid model: AI handles the initial scoring and prioritisation of risk, while documented rule-based logic still governs the final decision that must be defensible to a regulator.

The Regulatory Response: Catching Up to the Digital Frontier

Regulators worldwide have begun moving to close the most dangerous gaps exposed by this digital transformation of financial crime. (See Table 02)

What Comes Next

We have now traced this investigation from the centuries-old mechanics of Hawala and Undiyal, through the three-stage architecture that turns criminal proceeds into apparently legitimate wealth, to the AI-generated frontier of digital financial crime reshaping all of it at machine speed.

In our concluding instalment, Part IV: “Sri Lanka at the Crossroads: Economic Consequences, Organised Crime and the Road Ahead”, we bring this series home. We examine precisely what all of this costs Sri Lanka in hard economic terms: lost remittances, exchange rate pressure, tax revenue forgone, and the 2026 FATF evaluation that will determine whether the country’s institutions can demonstrate, with evidence rather than legislation alone, that they are equal to this challenge. We close with a practical policy roadmap.

(The writer, a senior Chartered Accountant and professional banker, is Professor at SLIIT, Malabe.
Views expressed in this article are personal.)

Features

‘There are no private universities in Sri Lanka’ – some considerations for higher education reform

Published

2 days ago

2026/07/21

Thilina Walpola

Academics involved in education policy like to say that there is no such thing as a private university in Sri Lanka. The only ‘universities’ in the country are state universities; anything else offering degrees is a private higher education institution (HEI). This position is technically accurate. Yet, in the discourse and imagination of the public, private universities are very real – people teach in them, students register in them, families pay fees, and such degree holders enter job markets in Sri Lanka and outside.

For decades, activists concerned for public higher education have ignored or resisted looking at private HEIs, as if such scrutiny would taint them. Others have worked in both types of institutions, carrying practices from each to the other. The apex body governing state universities, the UGC, has, meanwhile, ignored the concept of conflict of interest and appointed individuals in private higher education in committees and leadership positions. It is unsurprising then that some of the ideologies informing private higher education appear in reform agendas in the state sector.

This is a good time then to consider the varying types of private HEIs around us, and to take a look at some of the issues within them in the hope that higher education reform agendas will include private, as well as state higher education.

What is a ‘private university’?

First, some clarifications. In the public imaginary, a ‘private university’ is typically an institution that provides a foreign or local degree for which the student makes a payment. But this broad classification encompasses a host of diverse institutions and types of degrees which I detail below.

The Non-State Higher Education Division (NSHE) of the Ministry of Education has recognised 295 degrees by 32 institutions. Most of these are private companies and include a handful of established, well-known private HEIs that are ‘university like’. The degrees are local degrees conferred by the institutions accredited by the NSHE Division. While private HEIs conferring local degrees must be accredited by the NSHE Division, there appears to be no legal consequence for not doing so. In addition, there are several permutations of the private degree that miss the net of this Division and the Standing Committee on Accreditation and Quality Assurance (SCAQA) that assists this Division.

For one, degrees conferred by foreign universities offered, via these same private HEIs, are not vetted by the NSHE Division. Secondly, there is a growing plethora of private HEIs which have either no physical presence locally or only a dubious presence. The University Grants Commission has notified the public, through their website, that foreign universities listed in the Commonwealth Universities Yearbook and the World Higher Education Database are recognised, but refrained from giving any other details – which degrees? Offered by what modes? These details are not known. Some of the foreign universities in the lists may be legitimate entities in their own land but the degrees conferred locally, in their name, may not adhere to curriculum or teaching specifications of the NSHE Division or the UGC.

Another troubling phenomenon is the ‘top up degree’, which appears to work on the same principle as that of a pre-paid mobile connection: if I have a Diploma or an HND of a sort, I am eligible to complete a course of study which provides me with a degree, usually from a foreign university. The idea that someone who does not initially qualify for a degree programme should be able to work their way towards one is a progressive notion. This is the concept that open and distance learning (ODL) was based on initially, but which is now sadly exploited. ODL models are expected to provide opportunity for learning for those who may be excluded from traditional learning institutions. In Sri Lanka, however, we have seen ODL become a marketplace offering easy to obtain, for-fee qualifications by institutions with little commitment to superior teaching and learning.

Finally, a perusal of the many types of private HEIs and their varied degrees bring to mind another question – how should the private degrees, provided by state institutions (that are not educational institutions), be regulated? Who should do so?

All of these create a host of problems for the public – for hopeful students and parents and trusting employers. For the higher education sector, recruitment of academic staff, too, has become difficult due to this plethora of ambiguous higher education qualifications, as I discussed in a previous Kuppi article (‘Recruiting academics to state universities’).

Some issues in private HEIs – a bellwether for change in state universities

In this second part of this article, I will discuss some aspects of work in private HEIs – albeit the more established institutions – given that such issues may appear in reform agendas in future.

Across state universities, all permanent staff of a specific category are paid according to the same criteria. The picture is not so clear when it comes to private HEIs since they are different entities legally, typically companies. Private HEIs have salary scales and financial incentives that are different to each other. The more established private HEIs reportedly have attractive renumeration packages, possibly a reason for academics of state universities migrating eagerly to such institutions during sabbatical years and on retirement. This may not of course be the case with other less established, or improperly registered HEIs of which we know little. Academic staff of these more accepted private HEIs seem to value the high financial remuneration they receive (in comparison to state universities) as something that makes their work rewarding.

Attractive remuneration is important to sustain the good life and is at times seen as the institution’s way of encouraging good work. Yet, this has implications for the future of the institution: to continue to deliver on promised financial packages, institutions must continue to have large profit margins. One strategy has been to enroll multiple cohorts of students per year, even up to three or four intakes per year. This can result in exploitative work conditions, since staff must cater to all these cohorts in that same year. If there is inadequate staff, employees are further burdened. On the other hand, if there is a sudden drop in enrolments (degrees can go out of fashion) unexpected layoffs occur. Similar to other sectors that employ short-term contract staff – including state universities – in private HEIs, too, individual teachers, who are on short term contracts that need regular renewal, can feel pressured to work under difficult or exploitative conditions.

At the same time, even in the more established private HEIs, work norms differ from those of state universities in that they include promotional work that keeps the institution’s name in the eye of the public. The Marketing (or similarly named) unit comes up in conversations as one of the most important departments. It appears to weigh in on decision-making related to the number of staff, the amount of re-sits per exams, and other pedagogically important matters. This is a worrying example of how financial rationales interfere with pedagogically or academically sound processes, resulting in problematic results in the classroom. On the plus side, junior colleagues, who had experience in both state and private HEIs, also felt that they faced less harassment in private HEIs – primarily due to the private HEIs ability to take swift action in reported cases of harassment. This is a real indictment on state institutions and their reluctance to address chronic issues of harassment in our universities.

Yet, while we hear much about problems in state universities, we hardly hear of problems that staff in private HEIs face. One rationale for a lack of public expressions by staff is that expressions of discontent might lead to trouble given the importance of reputation for private HEIs. The worry about reputational damage is a growing concern in state universities, too, as evidenced by social media policies and internal conversations on reputational damage, consequent to negative publicity. Institutional worries of reputational damage are harmful in the long run since these impact not only freedom of expression by student and staff, but also research that is possible in and about the education sector.

Some thoughts at the end…

A close look at the private higher education sector is important given its strong presence in the country. Impending reform needs to regulate this diverse array of higher education offerings in the private sector, as well as the state institutions that offer privately-funded options of higher education (a topic for a separate Kuppi on its own). It is time we carefully considered how to build a whole system of higher education out of this broken mess.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

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

Features

Ready for solo spotlight

Published

2 days ago

2026/07/21

Thilina Walpola

Nish Peiris: Excited about future plans

Singer Nish Peiris is set to take the next big step in her music journey.

The talented vocalist, who has been seen and heard in the scene here for a short while, and was also featured with the now-defunct band, Inner Vision, has announced that she will be fully committing to her solo career, after completing her degree this year.

“I’m finishing my degree this year, and after that I’ll be fully committing to my solo music career,” Nish told The Island.

“I’ve already got a few tours lined up for next year, so I’m really excited for what’s ahead.”

Fans, no doubt, will remember Nish for her smooth voice and stage presence, and the good news is that she is now ready to chart her own path and bring new music to audiences at home and abroad.

With tours already planned for 2027, the year 2026 promises to be an exciting year for the young artiste as she steps into the spotlight on her own.

We wish Nish every success in this new chapter!