Features

Importing of liquefied natural gas – Past efforts and future prospects

Published

5 years ago

2021/01/11

By Dr Janaka Ratnasiri

The Island of 29.12.2020 carried a write up by Eng. Parakrama Jayasinghe in which he queried about the “very severe uncertainty of the source and the means of supplying the LNG necessary to operate the 300 MW LNG plant and the necessity for pursuing options for more LNG plants with India and Japan and now with the USA”? Though the term “LNG” appears here, it is something new to people in the country. Hence this write-up is published to apprise the readers what LNG is and highlight the progress made so far in procuring the gas, based on information available in the public domain.

GLOBAL PRODUCTION AND TRANSPORT OF NATURAL GAS

Natural gas (NG), though a new energy source yet to be introduced in Sri Lanka, has been in use world-wide since the middle of the last century. NG has been used in a variety of applications such as power generation, space heating, household cooking, thermal energy generation in industries, running motor vehicles and as a feedstock for a wide range of industries including fertilizers. Today, natural gas has a share of about 27% in the overall global energy supply and 23% in the generation of electricity.

Natural gas is the preferred fuel today for generating heat and power because of its many benefits. It does not produce any ash or particulates or smoke or toxic gases such as Sulphur Dioxide or toxic heavy metals like Mercury, Arsenic, Cobalt, Chromium or radionuclides, on combustion like in the case of coal or oil. Even the Oxides of Nitrogen produced is minimal and Carbon Dioxide produced is no more than 50% of what a similar capacity coal power plant produces. Hence many countries switch from coal to NG with the objective of reducing the emission of Carbon Dioxide which the countries have committed to under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Though nearly 100 countries have been producing NG world-wide, amounting to about 4,000 Billion cubic metres in 2019, only about 65 countries have produced more than 1 Billion cm each annually. Among the Indian Ocean rim countries, NG is produced in Qatar, Malaysia, Brunei, Tanzania, Myanmar, Indonesia and Australia. Natural gas is transported across continents in pipelines extending thousands of kilometres. For transporting across oceans, the gas is first converted into liquefied natural gas (LNG) by cooling down to -162 oC when its volume reduces to 1/600 of the original value.

Transportation of LNG across oceans is done in purposely built carriers with capacity between 150,000 and 250,000 cubic metres (cm) of LNG. Loading and unloading of LNG require special terminals having deep jetties which are costly to build. Once imported, LNG is converted into gas and stored under pressure for distribution among consumers in pipelines or as compressed natural gas (CNG) in cylinders. For distant consumers, LNG itself is transported in insulated containers by road trucks to consumer points.

PAST EFFORTS FOR IMPORTING LNG

During the past 20 years, there were several unsolicited proposals received for importing LNG, some through the Board of Investment (BOI) and others through political entities. Most of them were either rejected or withdrawn for various reasons, one being lack of transparency, but a few are still awaiting the green light from the Government. Though the Ministry of Petroleum had the authority to consider these proposals, they appeared to be rather reluctant to venture into a new area unknown hitherto, and took no action.

In the meantime, a representative of an Indian Gas Company visited Sri Lanka in mid-2016 and offered to bring LNG from their terminal in Kochin, Kerala. The terminal was being operated below capacity and the Company wanted to sell their surplus gas to Sri Lanka at the same rate they are paying for the imported gas with a slight mark up. They too did not receive any positive response.

When Sri Lanka PM met Indian PM in New Delhi in April 2017, the two heads of states entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for collaboration in several sectors including the power sector, under which importing of LNG and building a 500 MW gas power plant were included. The same Indian Company who offered to bring LNG was named as the Indian counterpart.

In 2016, Japan also had offered to build a 500 MW coal power plant which the Sri Lanka Government had accepted. However, with the government’s change of policy to shift from coal to gas for power generation, the government requested Japan to change its offer to a gas power plant of same capacity which Japan agreed to. The Cabinet of Ministers (COM) on 11.07.2017 accepted the two proposals to build gas power plants each with capacity 500 MW offered by India and Japan.

This was followed up by a decision taken by the COM on 27.02.2018 to grant approval for Sri Lanka to establish a tripartite joint venture (TJV) comprising 15% equity held by Sri Lanka, 47.5% by nominee of India and 37.5% by nominee of Japan for the purpose of implementing the project.

The COM also decided to vest authority with the newly established Sri Lanka Gas Terminal Company Ltd. (SLGTC), a fully-owned subsidiary of Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA), to enter into Agreements with the Indian and Japanese parties. The SLGTC was also nominated as the Developer for the Project. It is surprising why SLPA was authorized by the Government to import LNG when it has no mandate for it.

A MOU was signed among foreign members of the TJV and the SLGTC on 09.04.2018 probably confirming the responsibilities and commitments of each partner, which are still not made public. It is not known whether India and Japan would share the cost of the project and if so, in what ratio or jointly undertake its operation and maintenance or make in-kind contribution of transferring technology.

PRE-FEASIBILITY AND EIA REPORT ON THE PROJECT

A pre-feasibility study (PFS) was undertaken in 2017 by one of the Japanese partners of the TJV, which had recommended setting up a floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) moored initially in the South Port breakwater of Colombo Port. According to the PFS, the FSRU will have a draught of 12.5 m. The cost is expected to be around USD 225 Million and can be set up in 2.5 years.

A report by ADB on the proposed National Port Master Plan– Volume 2 (Part 5) released in February 2020, includes a section on FSRU to be located within the Port premises and gives details of its design and operation. (https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/project-documents/50184/50184-001-tacr-en_10.pdf). According to this study, the gas pipelines will connect the FSRU to the existing power plants at Kelanitissa and Kerawalapitiya laid part under water and part over land through the city and that the maximum send-out capacity of the of the terminal will be around 3.8 Mt LNG annually, which is on the high side.

Having found the project feasible, the TJV engaged the Environmental Resources Management (ERM) of Japan, to undertake an EIA study for the project which was completed in August 2019. The EIA Report was open for public scrutiny during December 2019. It is the general practice and a legal requirement to conduct a public hearing on the EIA report based on public comments received on it. However, there was neither a public hearing nor any announcement made as to whether the EIA Report was accepted or not, though almost one year has lapsed since closing of public comments.

The Writer responded highlighting shortcomings in many areas including discrepancies in capacity estimates, alternative supplies, exclusion zones, impact on Port operation, lack of mechanism for issuing operator licences and monitoring, issues with the site, safety aspects, lack of fire-fighting facilities, issues on routing the pipeline along city streets and issues on procurement of LNG, but received not even an acknowledgement or an invitation for a hearing.

FEASIBILITY STUDY OF THE PROJECT

In March 2019, the GoSL requested ADB for technical and financial assistance to conduct a detailed feasibility study on establishing the FSRU. The proposal named the CEB as the implementing agency and wanted the Technical Assistance Package (TAP) to include building the capacity of CEB to undertake the assignment. The ADB, in June 2009 approved an allocation of USD 225,000 as a grant to implement the feasibility study, including training of the CEB staff. The ADB study is expected to be completed by May 2020. (https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/project-documents/53193/53193-001-tam-en.pdf).

The package envisaged hiring on short-term basis experts on LNG Infrastructure Design; Marine Engineering; NG Pipeline Planning & Design and Financial & Commercial aspects to work out the optimal capacity for meeting the demand for using the gas for operating the existing and proposed new gas turbine power plants. The package also included holding training workshops to build the capacity of CEB engineers to handle the operation of the gas supply to the power plants.

Though the consultancy requires initial assessment of capacity of CEB staff to handle LNG import, being electrical engineers, one may safely assume that their capacity to undertake this assignment is almost nil. It is expected that the operation of the FSRU itself will be the responsibility of the supplier. It is surprising why ADB agreed to train a set of electrical engineers who are not qualified to work with LNG when LNG importing is outside the mandate of CEB.

CALLING PROPOSALS AND IMPLEMENTING THE PROJECT

The findings of the feasibility study are not available in the public domain yet, though supposed to have been completed more than six months ago. The ADB report is expected to include draft of request for proposals (RFP) from prospective suppliers for establishing the FSRU. This needs Cabinet approval before announcing, appointment of Technical Evaluation Committee (TEC) and Cabinet appointed Negotiation Committee (CANC). Once bids are received, it is necessary to have them evaluated by the TEC and approval by the CNC and finally by the Cabinet before the award of the contract is made. All these will take a minimum of two years going by the past experience.

Once the contractor is selected, CEB will have to negotiate the financial package with the contractor and considering the country’s poor credit rating internationally, it will be difficult to raise the finances through commercial banks, unless a multi-lateral financial institute like IMF or World Bank comes to Sri Lanka’s rescue or the TJV partners will contribute and this process itself will take more than a year.

These negotiations including signing contracts and the lead time in securing a FSRU and setting it up will take a minimum of another 3 years. This means that the country cannot expect to have the benefit of LNG this side of 6 years.

AUTHORITY FOR IMPORTING LNG AND DISTRIBUTING THE GAS

During the Yahapalana regime, the function of importing LNG and its distribution was vested in the Ministry of Petroleum through a gazette notification announced on 15.09.2015. However, during the subsequent regime, this function was entrusted to CEB by a decision of the COM. In the interim Cabinet appointed under the current regime, the function of “importing, refining, storage, distribution and marketing, coordination and implementation of petroleum-based products and natural gas” was assigned to the Ministry of Power and Energy by the Gazette Notification No. 2153/12 of 10.12.2019. Subsequently, with the appointment of the new Cabinet after the general election in August 2020, the Ministry of Energy was assigned the above functions related to natural gas.

A separate ADB publication on “Sri Lanka Energy Sector Assessment, Strategy, and Road Map” released in December 2019 says with regard to building LNG delivery infrastructure that “Since the LNG terminal may be used by many stakeholders for importation and storage, the terminal need not be under the CEB or power sector utilities and a more suitable arrangement would be a multiuser terminal facilitated by petroleum sector institutions”.

Surprisingly, the recommendation of this ADB report contradicts what is included in the ADB’s TAP referred to earlier where ADB has agreed to build capacity of CEB staff to handle operation of the proposed LNG terminal. As a matter of fact, the establishment of SLGTC has already been authorized by the COM on 27.02.2018 to handle matters related to LNG and NG matters. Further, the CEB Act does not give CEB any mandate to import fuel.

It is therefore surprising that the Government has sought assistance from the ADB to build the capacity of CEB to import LNG for power plant operation, as described in the previous section. Regrettably, the two Government institutions, SLPA and CEB are moving in different paths to achieve the same objective.

While the Government has given clear directive that matters pertaining to natural gas should be handled by the Ministry of Energy, it is not prudent to allow the CEB to handle it on grounds that it is CEB who will be consuming natural gas. If this is allowed, next time CEB will want to import petroleum oil as well for use in power plants.

REGULATORY BODY FOR THE LNG/NG INDUSTRY

With the closure of the Public Utilities Commission, it is now necessary to have a separate body under the purview of the Ministry of Energy to serve as the regulator and monitor for the gas sub-sector in the country. This body should be responsible for granting approval for all LNG/NG projects, monitor their operation and ensure all safety aspects are complied with according to international classified society standards, grant licenses for LNG/NG system operators, maintenance and installation technicians and safety officers.

It should be granted authority to determine prices levied for selling LNG/NG for different purposes; power generation, industrial heating, commercial and domestic application and as industrial feedstock, and should have powers similar to what the PUCSL was granted. In order to make this body effective, it is necessary to recruit staff with good academic background and experience working in the petroleum field and given further training enabling them to undertake the expected assignments efficiently. However, if CEB is permitted to import LNG, it is doubtful whether CEB will want another body to regulate and monitor them, as happening currently.

CONCLUSION

The Government had received several proposals for importing LNG during the past 20 years, but none were considered seriously. Interventions by foreign governments in 2017 prompted commencement of negotiations with them for importing LNG through a Tripartite Joint Venture set up three years ago. During this period, a pre-feasibility study including environment impact studies was undertaken which has recommended setting up a floating terminal within the Colombo Port premises. Subsequently, a detailed feasibility study was also undertaken findings of which are yet to be published.

There is lack of clarity as to who should import LNG and distribute the gas. Calling for proposals from prospective suppliers, their selection, signing of contracts, raising finances, getting Cabinet approvals and actual construction of the terminal will take at least another six years going by the past experience, unless the President directs the relevant officials to fast tract the process, enabling early realization of the objectives given in the Saubhagye Dekma Policy Framework.

There are however, faster ways of getting LNG into the country at least to operate the first 300 MW gas fired power plant bypassing all these procedures, but their discussion will be kept for a later article to save space here.

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Features

Meet the women protecting India’s snow leopards

Published

1 day ago

2026/02/6

Priyan

These women work with the local forest department to track and protect the snow leopard species [BBC]

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.

Spiti Wildlife Division A snow leopard looks into the camera — *Snow leopards are often called the “ghosts of the mountains” because they are so hard to spot [BBC]*

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.”

Devesh Chopra/BBC A woman wearing a black and red scarf writes something in her notebook and a camera trap is placed in front of her. — *The women set up cameras with unique IDs and memory cards, which capture an image of a snow leopard as soon as it passes through [BBC]*

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.

Spiti Wildlife Division A woman looks at a computer screen which has a grab of a leopard. — *Images captured by the camera traps are analysed using a special software [BBC]*

“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]

Features

Freedom for giants: What Udawalawe really tells about human–elephant conflict

Published

1 day ago

2026/02/6

Thilina Walpola

Too many vehicles entering national parks

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

Features

Challenges faced by the media in South Asia in fostering regionalism

Published

2 days ago

2026/02/5

Sahan Weerasooriya

Main speaker Roman Gautam (R) and Executive Director, RCSS, Ambassador (Retd) Ravinatha Aryasinha.

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.