Features

Why Oppose the Colombo Port City?

Published

5 years ago

2021/04/27

by Dr Laksiri Fernando

Why oppose the Colombo Port City or the Bill? Some may oppose because it is a Rajapaksa initiative. If it were a UNP or a SJB one, it would have been perfectly acceptable to them! Quite strangely, even the JVP leaders might be thinking in that direction. The role of the Opposition in a democratic society is completely misunderstood or turned upside down.

Some others may oppose because, arguably, it is against the country’s or people’s sovereignty. This may appear a reasonable assumption at least on the surface. However, the argument mainly comes from those who neglect or go against ‘sovereignty’ usually on behalf of foreign sources or forces.

If there are inconsistencies between the Bill and the constitution, that should be left to the Supreme Court to decide, while expressing one’s views is perfectly acceptable. Our constitution is 43 years old with contradictory 20 Amendments back and forth. Therefore, obviously there can be inconsistencies. Or even otherwise, there can be inconsistencies based on the so far accepted notions of democracy.

There are others who oppose the Port City or the Bill because of its China connection. They are basically, ultranationalists or Western aliened so-called liberals. This amalgamation is utterly strange. Among them are some hopeless leftists as well. Although they verbally talk about socialism (at least rarely), their primary contemporary concerns are purely constitutional law or political neoliberalism. Imbibed in Western cultural notions, they perhaps have some antipathy towards Chinese culture, language or even the people.

The Background

On 8 April, the Bill was presented to Parliament after the approval by the Cabinet and gazetted on 24 March. Within seven days it was challenged by 19 petitioners before the Supreme Court, and the government side has also submitted 13 petitions in support of the Bill. Soon we will have the Supreme Court verdict.

This 74 page gazette is prized only Rs. 112.00, less than half a dollar in the black market. The reason why I make this digression is to emphasize the need to rationalize the state sector, and in this case the Government Printers. Those who buy copies of gazettes are not the poor people, but the lawyers, members of parliament, businessmen and administrators. They can undoubtedly afford a higher price to cover the costs.

In the ongoing debates on the question of the Colombo Port City, while politics seem to dominate economics, in my opinion, it should be the other way around. This does not mean that politics always should follow economics, but it should be a major concern in particularly in a developing country like Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is still a lower-middle-income country with a per capita GDP of around $ 4,000. The population is nearly 21.8 million and the size of the economy is around $ 87 billion GDP. This is before the pandemic. Sri Lankan economy has contracted by 3.6 percent in 2020. We are now smaller in size, other than facing considerable difficulties in day-to-day life. During the bad days of the Covid-19 pandemic the revenue contracted, and the expenditure expanded with the fiscal deficit increasing. The public debt increased to 109.7 percent of the GDP, accumulating the delayed payments into it. There were concessions given to the businesses, like in many other countries, including tax moratoriums on debt payments.

There were some praises from the World Bank on fiscal and other economic policies of the country. “An improved trade balance and strong remittance inflows narrowed the current account deficit. A sharp drop in imports in 2020 more than offset the decline in exports,” they said. Imports dropped with some measures to restrict some nonessentials. Some of the ‘open, open, and open policies’ were changed on a pragmatic basis. There was no much grumble from the people. Of course, the financial inflows were insufficient to meet external liabilities. The external reserves dropped. Last month, however, through a currency swap with the People’s Bank of China worth $ 1.5 billion the external reserves are again strengthened.

Sri Lanka is now again facing a third wave of the Covid pandemic and the people and the political parties should be able to cooperate in resolving the attended problems before the situation gets worse and worse.

The Concept of the Port City

A Colombo port city is not completely a new concept. Colombo Fort was in fact a port city. However, the new concept came in 2011 with the building of the Colombo South Port. The reclamation of land around 660 acres for this purpose was given to the China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) and the work was completed by early 2018 for a cost of $15 billion. This is not a small amount. Therefore, the project should be cost effective, if not immediately, in the medium term.

Both last two governments had commitments for the project with differences. The idea of the last government (2015-2020) was to consider it a part of the Megapolis and the city area as an International Financial Centre. It was considered as part of the Colombo District with all the attached legal conditions. The present project and the presented Bill probably have gone back to the initial idea while expanding on it. Thus, the Port City is a special area with a special administration for broad economic purposes.

There is a new book published recently edited by Chulannee Attanayake, with 15 contributors, local and foreign, titled “Maritime Sri Lanka: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.” The book advocates the idea that Sri Lanka is not just a South Asian country but an Indian Ocean country. It goes on saying,

“The idea of being an Indian Ocean state is reflected in how Sri Lanka wants to promote itself as the centre of the Indian Ocean. Soon after the end of the conflict, the then government of Sri Lanka emphasized its interest in making Sri Lanka the naval, air and commercial hub in the Indian Ocean. The manifesto Mahinda Rajapaksa presented for the election held soon after the end of the war emphasized on using the country’s strategic geographical location in transforming Sri Lanka into a naval, aviation, commercial, energy and knowledge hub to serve as a link between the East and the West.”

The idea of a link between the East and the West has further merit in philosophical, social, and conceptual sense as well, although that aspect is not discussed in this article. Apart from that the Editor says, “The Sirisena-Wickremesighe government that came to power in 2015 continued the same ideology,” correct or not. She also quotes the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mangala Samaraweera saying “reclaiming our Indian Ocean identity helps us and others unlock the tremendous opportunities for attracting FDI, accessing markets and developing the tourism industry.”

Conclusion

The three main objectives of the proposed Bill are (1) to establish the Colombo Port City (CPC) formally, (2) to create a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) within it, and (3) to set up an Economic Commission (EC) to manage it, appointed by the President. It is important that the Bill derives its authority and purpose through the ‘Directive Principles of State Policy’ enshrined in the Constitution as an obligation of the State to ensure the rapid development of the country through public and private entrepreneurial activities.

The Special Economic Zone is defined in the Bill as “an international business and services hub with specialized infrastructure and other facilities within such Zone, for the promotion and facilitation of economic activity including international trade, shipping logistic operations, offshore banking and financial services, information technology and business process outsourcing, corporate headquarters operations, regional distribution operations, tourism, and other ancillary services.”

The Economic Commission is empowered “with the administration, regulation and control of, all matters connected with businesses and other operations, in and from the Area of Authority” of the Colombo Port City which is also the Special Economic Zone.

The above may appear quite uncontroversial. But the devil must be in the details. These are the details that must be interpreted and determined by the Supreme Court.

The Colombo Port City is not going to be an isolated economic zone. It is related to the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) initiated by China. That is the strength, and in some people’s opinion the unacceptability. The people and the parliamentarians must make a choice between the declining West (particularly the US) and the rising East (particularly China) in supporting or opposing this initiative. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong in ‘The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka’ having an alliance with ‘The ‘People’s Republic of China.’ Before all that, the country may have to get the Covid pandemic decisively under control.

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Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

43 mins ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

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

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

52 mins ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

53 mins ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins