Features
All hype and hot air?
The Colombo Climate Summit:
An interview with Dr. Rohan Pethiyagoda
by Ifham Nizam
The challenge before us, as a nation, is to build national resilience to climate change, says internationally recognised Sri Lankan scientist and policy advocate, Dr. Rohan Pethiyagoda, in an interview with The Island. “If the West wants us to reduce emissions, they should damn well be made to pay for it. As for us, we should reduce emissions only if and when this serves our national interest, that is, when it generates sustainable growth for us.”
Excerpts:
Q: Your keynote address at the Colombo Climate Summit held earlier this month raised some eyebrows because you said that bribery and corruption were one of the biggest threats that faces Sri Lanka in its response to climate change. What did you mean by that?
A: We have to recognise the fact that recent Sri Lankan governments have been corrupt on an industrial scale. In the run up to the 2015 election, the Yahapalana Coalition claimed massive corruption on the part of the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration. However, since then, Sri Lanka has sunk four more points towards the bottom of the Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International. We are now in the top 35% of the world’s most corrupt countries, our worst score ever. Everything from visas to wind power is being farmed out to cronies by the government without going through a transparent competitive bidding process.
Our national response to climate change, for example, will involve preventing saltwater intrusion into our 103 rivers as sea level rises in the coming decades. It will call for massive civil engineering interventions that will dwarf even the Mahaweli Project. It will cost tens of billions of dollars. This will be a gift to politicians anxious to exploit this opportunity for personal gain. That is why corruption threatens the building of national resilience to climate change. And that is why, unless we get the system change that the youth demanded when they booted Gotabaya Rajapaksa out of office in 2022, we are going to slide from bad to worse.
Q: There have been allegations on social media that the Climate Summit was all hype and hot air, serving only to greenwash the real issues. For example, it omitted to include many environmental NGOs and even government agencies associated with climate. Your response?
A: The Summit was organised by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC) and therefore aimed primarily at business and industry. It did not set out to formulate national policy. And the CCC did a great job, bringing in experts from across the world to lend their expertise. The challenges that climate change poses to business are very different to those that it poses to government. Businesses are concerned mainly with issues of sustainability. That is to say, how they can maximise their profitability while minimising their carbon footprints, maximising their energy efficiency, ensuring agricultural productivity, generating renewable energy, transacting climate-associated financial instruments, and so on.
The challenges before government, however, are very different. Government has to do stuff like building resilience to sea-level change, planning agriculture in a warmer world, investing in energy infrastructure, devising interventions to conserve biodiversity in a changing climate, managing urban water supply, irrigation and hydropower as rainfall regimes change, and so on. In fact, the government would do well to have its own climate summit to plan the National Response to Climate Change.
As I pointed out in my addresses to the summit, many of the national institutions that need to be at the forefront of our response to climate change are hopelessly underfunded and inefficient. I referred especially to the moribund Department of Meteorology, which badly needs a firecracker lit under it. But agriculture research, too, is lagging badly behind. As far as I know, none of our crop research institutes are developing new cultivars of tea or rice in greenhouse conditions that model future climate regimes. We have to do these things if we are to overcome the massive challenges that a changing climate poses.
Q:President Wickremesinghe has urged that Sri Lanka takes a lead in establishing the world’s first climate university. Isn’t that a step in the right direction?
A: Frankly, I think this is a waste of time and resources. First off, the word ‘university’ derives from the Latin root ‘universitas’, meaning ‘the whole’. In other words, a place that teaches everything. You do not have universities that teach only one subject. That is called a school, a faculty or an institute. It would have been better to invest the enormous sum of money he is trying to raise for this venture in the creation of climate schools in some of our universities. In fact, universities such as Peradeniya already have excellent programmes in the associated sciences. And goodness knows our existing universities are badly underfunded.
But the president is no fool. He knows that like ‘biodiversity’ in the 1990s, ‘terrorism’ in the 2000s, and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ in the 2010s, ‘climate’ is the international buzzword of this decade. At a time when Sri Lanka is insolvent and at the sharp end of the UN Human Rights Commission, mooting a climate university paints him and the country in a benign light in the international community. I suspect that this was the consideration driving his rhetoric about a climate university. I would be astonished if such a university ever comes into existence in Sri Lanka. But to be fair, his rhetoric does an excellent job of glossing over our many defects in the eyes of the gullible West.
Q: You raised some eyebrows in the run-up to the Summit when you were quoted as saying “There is no climate emergency”. However, UN Secretary General António Guterres has said that every country should declare a climate emergency. Does this mean that you are a climate change denier, a climate sceptic?
A: There is no doubt that climate is warming at an apparently unprecedented rate, and that human greenhouse gas emissions are exacerbating this warming. I fully support reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally and building national resilience to climate change. But I do not believe we require a state of emergency to do this. I should explain this.
First off, although Mr Guterres has verbally called on nations to declare emergencies, the UN itself has not declared an emergency. The UN’s procedure provides for it to declare a Level-3 emergency in such situations, but Guterres has not done that. As it happens, not even the UN’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) has advocated for a state of emergency. Meanwhile, even as Mr Guterres sings his hypocritical song, he continues to criss-cross the world in his private jet.
Second, as Sri Lankans know only too well, a state of emergency is a terrible thing. It suspends normal laws, it gives unlimited power to government, it sets aside human rights and freedoms, and it puts mature, thoughtful planning to one side and engenders ill-conceived knee-jerk reactions by government. We all saw all this play out in Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s disastrous management of the covid emergency, overriding the Health Ministry’s Public and Community Health professionals and turning over management of the pandemic to the army. People were arrested and even abducted for having covid, houses were raided, Muslims were prevented from burying their dead, and billions were spent on procuring covid test kits from cronies without a transparent procurement process. Previous governments used emergencies to incarcerate, torture and murder thousands of youths. We should have learned by now that emergencies are not things you can trust Sri Lankan politicians with.
Finally, you need to recognise that our response to climate change is going to take decades: certainly, beyond the end of this century. Do people seriously intend to have a state of emergency for the next 70 or 100 years? Only a very ignorant person would say so.
Q: But don’t we have a responsibility to be good global citizens? Should we not do everything we can to reduce emissions?
A: Look, for the past two centuries, the West industrialised at the cost of the global environment. The 50% increase we have seen in atmospheric carbon dioxide over that period is almost in its entirety caused by the West. They enriched themselves at the cost of the global environment with the one hand while suppressing us through colonialism with the other. And now they have the cheek to tell us, the developing world, that it is our job to be good global citizens? Look at it this way. Say that a cake was made for the whole world to share. Then, the West elbows its way to the table, gobbles up 90% of it and fattens itself. Having done that, it tells us “Now there’s only 10% left. Please be good global citizens and share this 10% equitably among yourselves and with us.” My answer is No. The developing world should simply tell the developed world to fly a kite. They caused this mess, and they should pay to clean it up, not us.
The challenge before us, as a nation, is to build national resilience to climate change. If the West wants us to reduce emissions, they should damn well be made to pay for it. As for us, we should reduce emissions only if and when this serves our national interest, that is, when it generates sustainable growth for us. But then, even when wind power, for example, has become dirt cheap worldwide, we are paying three times the world price for it here in Sri Lanka because corrupt people are lining their pockets with loot.
In my view, Sri Lanka should even consider withdrawing from the UN’s COP (Conference of Parties) process. Now we are at the 29th COP, which if nothing else, shows that the first 28 COPs were failures. They have done nothing to attenuate climate change. These COP meetings involve thousands of officials flying to global tourism hotspots every year, cramming into five-star hotels and returning home with papers full of promises and platitudes. None of that ever gets turned into so-called climate action. It is a waste of time, and we should have the courage to say so and refuse to dance to the West’s tune. Of course, they will try to cut so-called aid to us. But if we state our case clearly to the citizens of the West, showing that their governments’ demands that we mitigate climate change are just an extension of the colonial enterprise, I think we will win the day. We need to call out the West’s hypocrisy.
Q: That’s a strong word. Can you seriously make such a claim?
A: What, hypocrisy? Of course, I can. Just take the UK. Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions are now 50% lower than they were in 1990. The UK is the poster child of the developed world. Three cheers! But how did they do it? First, they exported a lot of their emissions by turning from a high-carbon manufacturing economy into a low-carbon service economy. Goods for the UK market are now increasingly manufactured overseas, so the exporting countries’, principally China, are doing the emitting on the UK’s behalf. The UK has also been replacing high-CO2 coal as a source of energy with ‘renewable’ wood-pellets imported from North America. Millions of tons of wood pellets. Its argument is that this is sustainable because the CO2 that wood combustion emits will be reabsorbed when those American forests are replanted. But they claim the emissions reduction now, even though the trees will not grow back for decades from now. Such examples, to my mind, are indicative of the lowest form of hypocrisy and we should call them out on it. But the UK may not be the worst offender: Germany is not far behind. So yes, I am serious when I call these countries hypocrites. Sadly, most of their citizens are unaware of the true facts, and I don’t blame them. They too, are misled by their governments.
Q: You make everything sound pretty hopeless…
A: Ah, but I am optimistic. I think governments like the UK’s and Germany’s have been stampeded by activists into making promises that they simply cannot keep. But globally, humans have been wonderful innovators. Our hallmark as a species is innovating. I have no doubt that we will innovate our way out of global warming too. This is a long journey, and we are only at the beginning. If we keep our nerve and stay the course like responsible adults should, we’re going to come out of this just fine. But by then there will be new problems that call for yet more innovations. That’s the human predicament, the human story.
Q: Are there examples of innovations in Sri Lanka that help address climate threats?
A: There are many. Colombo Port City is a fine example of the kind of engineering we need to reclaim land that lies below sea level. Industry has been becoming more sustainable, too. Star Garments’ 35,000-square foot facility in Katunayake is South Asia’s first certified ‘Passive House’ factory: It uses 70% less energy than other buildings of comparable size. And if you think about it, the thousands of tanks and reservoirs scattered across the dry zone were built by Sri Lankan kings over the past 2000 years as a response to a climate threat, namely drought. What a phenomenal innovation that ‘hydraulic civilization’ was!
And then there are the ongoing efforts to reconnect fragmented wet-zone forest fragments by means of biodiversity corridors. Initiatives by NGOs such as the PLANT project of the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society, the rainforest and mangrove restoration projects of Biodiversity Sri Lanka, and the 2-km forest corridor at Endana near Kahawatta by Dilmah Conservation are leading the way in this regard. I urge your readers to support these pioneering projects. That is how, by everyone doing their bit, Sri Lanka can build resilience to the climate of the future.
In one of India’s coldest and most remote regions, a group of women have taken on an unlikely role: protecting one of Asia’s most elusive predators, the snow leopard.
Snow leopards are found in just 12 countries across Central and South Asia. India is home to one of the world’s largest populations, with a nationwide survey in 2023 – the first comprehensive count ever carried out in the country – estimating more than 700 animals, .
One of the places they roam is around Kibber village in Himachal Pradesh state’s Spiti Valley, a stark, high-altitude cold desert along the Himalayan belt. Here, snow leopards are often called the “ghosts of the mountains”, slipping silently across rocky slopes and rarely revealing themselves.
For generations, the animals were seen largely as a threat, for attacking livestock. But attitudes in Kibber and neighbouring villages are beginning to shift, as people increasingly recognise the snow leopard’s role as a top predator in the food chain and its importance in maintaining the region’s fragile mountain ecosystem.
Nearly a dozen local women are now working alongside the Himachal Pradesh forest department and conservationists to track and protect the species, playing a growing role in conservation efforts.
Locally, the snow leopard is known as Shen and the women call their group “Shenmo”. Trained to install and monitor camera traps, they handle devices fitted with unique IDs and memory cards that automatically photograph snow leopards as they pass.
“Earlier, men used to go and install the cameras and we kept wondering why couldn’t we do it too,” says Lobzang Yangchen, a local coordinator working with a small group supported by the non-profit Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) in collaboration with the forest department.
Yangchen was among the women who helped collect data for Himachal Pradesh’s snow leopard survey in 2024, which found that the state was home to 83 snow leopards – up from 51 in 2021.
The survey documented snow leopards and 43 other species using camera traps spread across an area of nearly 26,000sq km (10,000sq miles). Individual leopards were identified by the unique rosette patterns on their fur, a standard technique used for spotted big cats. The findings are now feeding into wider conservation and habitat-management plans.
“Their contribution was critical to identifying individual animals,” says Goldy Chhabra, deputy conservator of forests with the Spiti Wildlife Division.
Collecting the data is demanding work. Most of it takes place in winter, when heavy snowfall pushes snow leopards and their prey to lower altitudes, making their routes easier to track.
On survey days, the women wake up early, finish household chores and gather at a base camp before travelling by vehicle as far as the terrain allows. From there, they trek several kilometres to reach camera sites, often at altitudes above 14,000ft (4,300m), where the thin air makes even simple movement exhausting.
The BBC accompanied the group on one such trek in December. After hours of walking in biting cold, the women suddenly stopped on a narrow trail.
Yangchen points to pugmarks in the dust: “This shows the snow leopard has been here recently. These pugmarks are fresh.”
Along with pugmarks, the team looks for other signs, including scrapes and scent‑marking spots, before carefully fixing a camera to a rock along the trail.
One woman then carries out a “walk test”, crawling along the path to check whether the camera’s height and angle will capture a clear image.
The group then moves on to older sites, retrieving memory cards and replacing batteries installed weeks earlier.
By mid-afternoon, they return to camp to log and analyse the images using specialised software – tools many had never encountered before.
“I studied only until grade five,” says Chhering Lanzom. “At first, I was scared to use the computer. But slowly, we learned how to use the keyboard and mouse.”
The women joined the camera-trapping programme in 2023. Initially, conservation was not their motivation. But winters in the Spiti Valley are long and quiet, with little agricultural work to fall back on.
“At first, this work on snow leopards didn’t interest us,” Lobzang says. “We joined because we were curious and we could earn a small income.”
The women earn between 500 ($5.46; £4) and 700 rupees a day.
But beyond the money, the work has helped transform how the community views the animal.
“Earlier, we thought the snow leopard was our enemy,” says Dolma Zangmo, a local resident. “Now we think their conservation is important.”
Alongside survey work, the women help villagers access government insurance schemes for their livestock and promote the use of predator‑proof corrals – stone or mesh enclosures that protect animals at night.
Their efforts come at a time of growing recognition for the region. Spiti Valley has recently been included in the Cold Desert Biosphere Reserve, a Unesco-recognised network aimed at conserving fragile ecosystems while supporting local livelihoods.
As climate change reshapes the fragile trans-Himalayan landscape, conservationists say such community participation will be crucial to safeguarding species like the snow leopard.
“Once communities are involved, conservation becomes more sustainable,” says Deepshikha Sharma, programme manager with NCF’s High Altitudes initiative.
“These women are not just assisting, they are becoming practitioners of wildlife conservation and monitoring,” she adds.
As for the women, their work makes them feel closer to their home, the village and the mountains that raised them, they say.
“We were born here, this is all we know,” Lobzang says. “Sometimes we feel afraid because these snow leopards are after all predatory animals, but this is where we belong.”
[BBC]
If elephants are truly to be given “freedom” in Udawalawe, the solution is not simply to open gates or redraw park boundaries. The map itself tells the real story — a story of shrinking habitats, broken corridors, and more than a decade of silent but relentless ecological destruction.
“Look at Udawalawe today and compare it with satellite maps from ten years ago,” says Sameera Weerathunga, one of Sri Lanka’s most consistent and vocal elephant conservation activists. “You don’t need complicated science. You can literally see what we have done to them.”
What we commonly describe as the human–elephant conflict (HEC) is, in reality, a land-use conflict driven by development policies that ignore ecological realities. Elephants are not invading villages; villages, farms, highways and megaprojects have steadily invaded elephant landscapes.
Udawalawe: From Landscape to Island
Udawalawe National Park was once part of a vast ecological network connecting the southern dry zone to the central highlands and eastern forests. Elephants moved freely between Udawalawe, Lunugamvehera, Bundala, Gal Oya and even parts of the Walawe river basin, following seasonal water and food availability.
Today, Udawalawe appears on the map as a shrinking green island surrounded by human settlements, monoculture plantations, reservoirs, electric fences and asphalt.
“For elephants, Udawalawe is like a prison surrounded by invisible walls,” Sameera explains. “We expect animals that evolved to roam hundreds of square nationakilometres to survive inside a box created by humans.”
Elephants are ecosystem engineers. They shape forests by dispersing seeds, opening pathways, and regulating vegetation. Their survival depends on movement — not containment. But in Udawalawa, movement is precisely what has been taken away.
Over the past decade, ancient elephant corridors have been blocked or erased by:
Irrigation and agricultural expansion
Tourism resorts and safari infrastructure
New roads, highways and power lines
Human settlements inside former forest reserves
Sameera
“The destruction didn’t happen overnight,” Sameera says. “It happened project by project, fence by fence, without anyone looking at the cumulative impact.”
The Illusion of Protection
Sri Lanka prides itself on its protected area network. Yet most national parks function as ecological islands rather than connected systems.
“We think declaring land as a ‘national park’ is enough,” Sameera argues. “But protection without connectivity is just slow extinction.”
Udawalawe currently holds far more elephants than it can sustainably support. The result is habitat degradation inside the park, increased competition for resources, and escalating conflict along the boundaries.
“When elephants cannot move naturally, they turn to crops, tanks and villages,” Sameera says. “And then we blame the elephant for being a problem.”
The Other Side of the Map: Wanni and Hambantota
Sameera often points to the irony visible on the very same map. While elephants are squeezed into overcrowded parks in the south, large landscapes remain in the Wanni, parts of Hambantota and the eastern dry zone where elephant density is naturally lower and ecological space still exists.
“We keep talking about Udawalawe as if it’s the only place elephants exist,” he says. “But the real question is why we are not restoring and reconnecting landscapes elsewhere.”
The Hambantota MER (Managed Elephant Reserve), for instance, was originally designed as a landscape-level solution. The idea was not to trap elephants inside fences, but to manage land use so that people and elephants could coexist through zoning, seasonal access, and corridor protection.
“But what happened?” Sameera asks. “Instead of managing land, we managed elephants. We translocated them, fenced them, chased them, tranquilised them. And the conflict only got worse.”
The Failure of Translocation
For decades, Sri Lanka relied heavily on elephant translocation as a conflict management tool. Hundreds of elephants were captured from conflict zones and released into national parks like Udawalawa, Yala and Wilpattu.
Elephant deaths
The logic was simple: remove the elephant, remove the problem.
The reality was tragic.
“Most translocated elephants try to return home,” Sameera explains. “They walk hundreds of kilometres, crossing highways, railway lines and villages. Many die from exhaustion, accidents or gunshots. Others become even more aggressive.”
Scientific studies now confirm what conservationists warned from the beginning: translocation increases stress, mortality, and conflict. Displaced elephants often lose social structures, familiar landscapes, and access to traditional water sources.
“You cannot solve a spatial problem with a transport solution,” Sameera says bluntly.
In many cases, the same elephant is captured and moved multiple times — a process that only deepens trauma and behavioural change.
Freedom Is Not About Removing Fences
The popular slogan “give elephants freedom” has become emotionally powerful but scientifically misleading. Elephants do not need symbolic freedom; they need functional landscapes.
Real solutions lie in:
Restoring elephant corridors
Preventing development in key migratory routes
Creating buffer zones with elephant-friendly crops
Community-based land-use planning
Landscape-level conservation instead of park-based thinking
“We must stop treating national parks like wildlife prisons and villages like war zones,” Sameera insists. “The real battlefield is land policy.”
Electric fences, for instance, are often promoted as a solution. But fences merely shift conflict from one village to another.
“A fence does not create peace,” Sameera says. “It just moves the problem down the line.”
A Crisis Created by Humans
Sri Lanka loses more than 400 elephants and nearly 100 humans every year due to HEC — one of the highest rates globally.
Yet Sameera refuses to call it a wildlife problem.
“This is a human-created crisis,” he says. “Elephants are only responding to what we’ve done to their world.”
From expressways cutting through forests to solar farms replacing scrublands, development continues without ecological memory or long-term planning.
“We plan five-year political cycles,” Sameera notes. “Elephants plan in centuries.”
The tragedy is not just ecological. It is moral.
“We are destroying a species that is central to our culture, religion, tourism and identity,” Sameera says. “And then we act surprised when they fight back.”
The Question We Avoid Asking
If Udawalawe is overcrowded, if Yala is saturated, if Wilpattu is bursting — then the real question is not where to put elephants.
The real question is: Where have we left space for wildness in Sri Lanka?
Sameera believes the future lies not in more fences or more parks, but in reimagining land itself.
“Conservation cannot survive as an island inside a development ocean,” he says. “Either we redesign Sri Lanka to include elephants, or one day we’ll only see them in logos, statues and children’s books.”
And the map will show nothing but empty green patches — places where giants once walked, and humans chose. roads instead.
By Ifham Nizam
SAARC or the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has been declared ‘dead’ by some sections in South Asia and the idea seems to be catching on. Over the years the evidence seems to have been building that this is so, but a matter that requires thorough probing is whether the media in South Asia, given the vital part it could play in fostering regional amity, has had a role too in bringing about SAARC’s apparent demise.
That South Asian governments have had a hand in the ‘SAARC debacle’ is plain to see. For example, it is beyond doubt that the India-Pakistan rivalry has invariably got in the way, particularly over the past 15 years or thereabouts, of the Indian and Pakistani governments sitting at the negotiating table and in a spirit of reconciliation resolving the vexatious issues growing out of the SAARC exercise. The inaction had a paralyzing effect on the organization.
Unfortunately the rest of South Asian governments too have not seen it to be in the collective interest of the region to explore ways of jump-starting the SAARC process and sustaining it. That is, a lack of statesmanship on the part of the SAARC Eight is clearly in evidence. Narrow national interests have been allowed to hijack and derail the cooperative process that ought to be at the heart of the SAARC initiative.
However, a dimension that has hitherto gone comparatively unaddressed is the largely negative role sections of the media in the SAARC region could play in debilitating regional cooperation and amity. We had some thought-provoking ‘takes’ on this question recently from Roman Gautam, the editor of ‘Himal Southasian’.
Gautam was delivering the third of talks on February 2nd in the RCSS Strategic Dialogue Series under the aegis of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo, at the latter’s conference hall. The forum was ably presided over by RCSS Executive Director and Ambassador (Retd.) Ravinatha Aryasinha who, among other things, ensured lively participation on the part of the attendees at the Q&A which followed the main presentation. The talk was titled, ‘Where does the media stand in connecting (or dividing) Southasia?’.
Gautam singled out those sections of the Indian media that are tamely subservient to Indian governments, including those that are professedly independent, for the glaring lack of, among other things, regionalism or collective amity within South Asia. These sections of the media, it was pointed out, pander easily to the narratives framed by the Indian centre on developments in the region and fall easy prey, as it were, to the nationalist forces that are supportive of the latter. Consequently, divisive forces within the region receive a boost which is hugely detrimental to regional cooperation.
Two cases in point, Gautam pointed out, were the recent political upheavals in Nepal and Bangladesh. In each of these cases stray opinions favorable to India voiced by a few participants in the relevant protests were clung on to by sections of the Indian media covering these trouble spots. In the case of Nepal, to consider one example, a young protester’s single comment to the effect that Nepal too needed a firm leader like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seized upon by the Indian media and fed to audiences at home in a sensational, exaggerated fashion. No effort was made by the Indian media to canvass more opinions on this matter or to extensively research the issue.
In the case of Bangladesh, widely held rumours that the Hindus in the country were being hunted and killed, pogrom fashion, and that the crisis was all about this was propagated by the relevant sections of the Indian media. This was a clear pandering to religious extremist sentiment in India. Once again, essentially hearsay stories were given prominence with hardly any effort at understanding what the crisis was really all about. There is no doubt that anti-Muslim sentiment in India would have been further fueled.
Gautam was of the view that, in the main, it is fear of victimization of the relevant sections of the media by the Indian centre and anxiety over financial reprisals and like punitive measures by the latter that prompted the media to frame their narratives in these terms. It is important to keep in mind these ‘structures’ within which the Indian media works, we were told. The issue in other words, is a question of the media completely subjugating themselves to the ruling powers.
Basically, the need for financial survival on the part of the Indian media, it was pointed out, prompted it to subscribe to the prejudices and partialities of the Indian centre. A failure to abide by the official line could spell financial ruin for the media.
A principal question that occurred to this columnist was whether the ‘Indian media’ referred to by Gautam referred to the totality of the Indian media or whether he had in mind some divisive, chauvinistic and narrow-based elements within it. If the latter is the case it would not be fair to generalize one’s comments to cover the entirety of the Indian media. Nevertheless, it is a matter for further research.
However, an overall point made by the speaker that as a result of the above referred to negative media practices South Asian regionalism has suffered badly needs to be taken. Certainly, as matters stand currently, there is a very real information gap about South Asian realities among South Asian publics and harmful media practices account considerably for such ignorance which gets in the way of South Asian cooperation and amity.
Moreover, divisive, chauvinistic media are widespread and active in South Asia. Sri Lanka has a fair share of this species of media and the latter are not doing the country any good, leave alone the region. All in all, the democratic spirit has gone well into decline all over the region.
The above is a huge problem that needs to be managed reflectively by democratic rulers and their allied publics in South Asia and the region’s more enlightened media could play a constructive role in taking up this challenge. The latter need to take the initiative to come together and deliberate on the questions at hand. To succeed in such efforts they do not need the backing of governments. What is of paramount importance is the vision and grit to go the extra mile.
India chase sixth Under-19 World Cup title, England their first since 1998
Meet the women protecting India’s snow leopards
Louvre Museum crown left crushed but ‘intact’ after raid
US and Iran talks to begin as fears of direct conflict continue
INS GHARIAL makes port call in Colombo
ICC-PCB in back-channel talks to resolve India boycott at T20 World Cup
‘Dates have the highest sugar content to fight Coronavirus’
Sunday Island 27 December – Headlines
#SundayIsland 17th December – Headlines
Sunday Island – 28th March
Sunday Island Headlines – 21 March
Sunday Island – 21st February – Headlines
-
Business6 days agoHayleys Mobility ushering in a new era of premium sustainable mobility
-
Business3 days agoSLIM-Kantar People’s Awards 2026 to recognise Sri Lanka’s most trusted brands and personalities
-
Business6 days agoAdvice Lab unveils new 13,000+ sqft office, marking major expansion in financial services BPO to Australia
-
Business6 days agoArpico NextGen Mattress gains recognition for innovation
-
Business5 days agoAltair issues over 100+ title deeds post ownership change
-
Editorial6 days agoGovt. provoking TUs
-
Business5 days agoSri Lanka opens first country pavilion at London exhibition
-
Business4 days agoAll set for Global Synergy Awards 2026 at Waters Edge