Features

Situlpauwa, Veddas, building a bungalow at Thenaddi Bay on idyllic East coast

Published

4 years ago

2023/03/12

Thilina Walpola

Excerpted from te authorized biography of Thilo Hoffmann by Douglas B. Ranasinghe

(Continued from last week)

Thilo continues: “The Ven. Bhikkhu Sumedha, a long-time friend who had grown up in Switzerland, spent his early hermit years as a Buddhist monk at Situlpauwa and at the top of Vedahitikanda. He later obtained higher ordination, and died in Kandy in 2006. On his occasional visits to Colombo, dana was regularly offered at our house. Situlpauwa was then a jungle-covered site with only an occasional hermit monk in residence, and wildlife roaming freely through it. Today, as a result of restoration and development, the jungle has given way to concrete, electric lights, noise and commerce.”

During his time in Sri Lanka Thilo has been dismayed to witness such change, in diverse ways, at countless holy and historical places. He adds one example: “We may perhaps record two different alterations at the famous Koneswaram Temple, on Swami Rock at Trincomalee. The entire temple has been ‘restored’ and renovated, covering under cement and plaster and layers of glossy new paint all traces of its ancient history.

“It is also the site of an act of vandalism. There on a stone pillar was an inscription in high relief recording the death of a young Dutch woman who in the 18th century threw herself over the precipice after watching her lover’s ship sail away. This was chiselled away in the 1980s, a testimony to the prevalent politico-religious chauvinism.”

Veddas

In 1950 Thilo and Mae visited the Pollebedda Veddas in the company of Dr R. L. Spittel. After Thilo finished work at the office on Friday, they drove through the night to Maha Oya, via Haputale, Badulla and Bibile. In the early morning Spittel took them to Pollebedda, deep in the dry zone jungle, where a small and reasonably typical Vedda community was living.

Dr Spittel pointed out two younger men whom he described as “good throwbacks” and who, though of mixed blood, showed external characteristics of the Vedda race. He explained that the pure Veddas had ceased to exist some 20 years earlier as by then they had all been absorbed in the Sinhalese and Tamil populations. Thilo adds that other authorities with first-hand knowledge of the Veddas agree with this view. A dance was performed, and the visitors observed the families in their daily activties. Most had huts to live in, and were cultivating. There was one tent-like hut covered with pieces of tree bark. Rats were an item in the diet.

Twenty-six years later, in July 1976, the Hoffmanns again visited Pollebedda, which is about 15 km south of Maha Oya along the Rambukkan Oya. They camped out in a vain bid to see a rare bird, the broad-billed roller, which had been reported there. The place had changed beyond recognition, the thick forest had been cleared, and chenas had turned it into a ‘scrub desert’. A school building and teachers’ quarters had been put up. There was no trace of the Vedda settlement. Thilo explains:

“Today’s `show-Veddas’ of Dambana (so styled by the Seligmanns even a century ago), led by the offspring of a southern Sinhalese, masquerade as true Veddas for a gullible public. There is the strong impression that an outside ‘guru’ is instructing them in some of the old Vedda facts and customs obtained from the literature, e.g. the present name of the ‘chief, or the offering of bees’ honey to the sacred Tooth Relic. If you discount the costume and appendages (axe, bow and arrow) none of the Dambana villagers even look like Veddas.

Well before the Maduru Oya National Park had been declared, large areas in it north of Dambana and Maha Oya had been cleared of jungle and settled. Village infrastructure had been established, schools and ancillary buildings constructed. ‘Vedda life’ had been greatly restricted and consisted chiefly of poaching (not with bow and arrow) as in all villages in jungle areas.

When the Park was declared all the people living within its boundaries and in the bed of the new reservoir were given alternative land and habitations in newly developed areas. The people of Dambana, although the village itself is not in the Park, were offered irrigable land and houses below the nearby Ratkinda reservoir.

All accepted and moved except the fake Vedda chief Tisahamy, a Sinhalese who had shrewdly adopted the name of Dr Spittel’s hero, and his family. He successfully defied law and authority, lived in a large house in the midst of a banana plantation just inside the National Park boundary, and, with his young offspring play-acted the Vedda for assorted local and foreign tourists. Supported by sponsors and gurus, he even obtained an order from the District Court which forced the Wildlife Department to demolish the gate they had put up at the boundary of the Park.

Time went by and the new Tisahamy died. Recent history was quickly forgotten, and with the help of journalists, gullible politicians, foreign and local anthropologists the Vedda race was miraculously resuscitated. The settlers from Ratkinda now returned to Dambana, as the life of a show-Vedda had become full of promise.

Soon the motley crowd became even the internationally acknowledged representatives of the ‘indigenous people’ of Sri Lanka, and their leaders put in an expenses-paid appearance at the Permanent Forum of Indigenous People of the UN in Geneva, Switzerland. Local intellectuals and politicians recognized this set-up early as a god-sent opportunity to gain status and publicity. The highest authorities were persuaded to accord the “Veddas” privileges not given to any others, such as free movement and hunting, with guns, within the National Park.

This is the story of a scrappy bunch of villagers who by ruse and the cunning ‘PR-ship’ of their leader and his advisors became the `indigenous people’ of Sri Lanka, and as such are being cuddled by the State, the tourists and some of the island’s elite. Others have joined the bandwagon and, true to form, new demands are being presented.

If these, or other, villagers want to re-enact Vedda customs and habits in order to generate attention and income for themselves then that is their business. But they cannot expect nor be given special rights and privileges under the laws of the country.

The East

Few today are aware that the southern part of the Eastern Province, including Batticaloa, was virtually cut off from the rest of the country until the mid 20th century. At the time of Thilo’s first visits the motorable road ended at Polonnaruwa. Then, the railway bridges at Manampitiya and Valaichchenai (which had been opened in 1928) were converted to dual rail and road use, and connecting roads built, which allowed for the first time relatively easy access to that part of the East of Sri Lanka.

Before this Batticaloa could be reached from Colombo by road only via Beragala (below Haputale, at 3,500 ft, or 1,100 m a.s.1.) – Wellawaya – Pottuvil, or even more tediously via Badulla – Passara – Bibile – Eravur; and before the Second World War only by boat. To get to Batticaloa from Trincomalee ferries had to be used at seven places and the 80-mile (130 km) trip needed a full day.

Until the Second World War there had been a coastal shipping service for cargo and passengers. The vessels were named after the wives of past British Governors: Lady Manning, etc. and the line was called ‘the Lady line’. The small steamboats berthed at all coastal towns of some importance: Chilaw, Negombo, Colombo, Beruwela, Galle, Hambantota, Arugam Bay, Batticaloa, Kalkudah, Trincomalee and KKS. Until recently the remnants of the old piers could be seen at Hambantota and Kalkudah.

The East thus very much led a life of its own. It was and is distinctly different from the North. Its coconut industry – this too is not well known – was pioneered by British proprietary planters who settled there in the 19th century. The transformation of the Eastern Province began with the Gal Oya Development Project in the 1950s. Even until the end of that decade there was a change in the direction of milestones near Siyambalanduwa, because the road had been constructed starting from both ends.

The Eastern Province has a great touristic potential, but its development should be undertaken with circumspection and responsibility. Earlier attempts, especially at Kalkudah and Passikudah and to some extent at Arugam Bay and in the wider Trincomalee area, do not inspire much hope that natural and traditional assets will be suitably protected and preserved.

Thenaddi Bay

In the 1960s Thilo purchased a piece of land on the beach at Thenaddi Bay, a few miles north of Valaichchenai. For several years he had been searching for a suitable site on the East coast between Panama and Trincomalee. Then one day Mr S.V.O. Somanader of Kalkudah, who knew of his interest, drew his attention to a plot available at Kayankerni. Thilo had a look at the one-inch map, and instantly bought it without having seen it!

It proved to be a ‘dream’ location, alone in the centre of the wide bay with sandy, tree-fringed beaches and with crystal-clear blue water, except during the north-east monsoon when the sea is rough.

The tiny village of Kayankerni is a stronghold of the so-called Coast Veddas, a group of people who Thilo says are “as racially mixed as their forest-dwelling relatives, who deny any connection”. Here also is a small and simple temple in which the mysterious Kapal-Theivam (Kapalpei) ceremony is celebrated. The powerful deity is a foreigner who arrived in a ship. In the temple compound the wooden model of a ship is displayed atop a high pole.

First, the basic unit of the holiday home was constructed: a fortress-like large rectangle of 15-foot high white walls, roofs sloping inward, an open inner courtyard with a well in its centre, and a wide seaward veranda. Thilo received enthusiastic and active assistance from his friend Lalith Senanayake.

In the following years, sporadically, many additions were made: bedrooms, a roof-top veranda with a spiral staircase; a guest-house, separate but connected by a covered passageway, with `meda midula’ and kitchen; a boathouse, a water tower, a garage, and eventually a two-storied rear wing.

Xavier Jobin and Stanley Gnanam, both of Baurs’ Palugaswewa Estate, with their wide experience in building, contributed greatly, also to necessary alterations and repairs; and Mr S. M. Sathiacama, then an engineer at Baurs, was very helpful. The very extensive roofs were covered with country tiles, which were frequently damaged by playful monkeys – who also “harvested” all the coconuts, well before maturity, on the 20-odd palms near the house!

Geoffrey Bawa, who was a friend of the Hoffmanns, called it “the best non-architect house I have seen”. There was no electricity. Kerosene fuelled the lamps at night and the refrigerator.For Thilo, working and sweating in the house and land was a regular and satisfying recreation. There was always something needing repair or maintenance or development. The first and often exasperating task on arrival was to start the fridge and the motor of the water pump. One of the most exhilarating moments of Thilo’s life, he recounts, was when he struck water some 10 or 12 feet down a hot and narrow cement tube. It was the first well on the property, and the main house was then built around it.

In the rear of the property Thilo developed his own little jungle from “the most thorny and impenetrable thicket in the world”. Along the beach he planted wind and salt resistant shrubs and palmyra palms.

For many years the Hoffmanns and their friends spent the most memorable weekends and holidays in this “magical” place, considered by some as the best times of their lives. There were marvellous coral reefs at the northern end of the bay, and others several miles long fringed the bay towards the open sea. These were rich in marine life, and comparable to the Maldives. There was fishing, diving, and snorkeling as well as underwater photography.

They did excursions up and down the coast to Trincomalee, the Baron’s Cap area – Toppigala, later of LTTE fame, locally called Kudumbi Kanda – and other remote inland wildlife areas. In most of these elephants were numerous. There was a fibreglass boat with outboard motor, which was later seized by the LTTE. They often went to Tamankaduwa, where elephants congregate in large numbers at times; up to more than 200 together have been observed by Thilo in that area1. Occasionally elephants even visited his property.

Thilo knew all the unique villus along the Mahaweli Ganga, which are fed and maintained by water from the river. They are part of the great biological diversity in the neglected Flood Plains and Somawathiya National Parks and adjoining protected areas; some of these form beautiful, wide landscapes, known to few. Their restoration now as effective conservation areas is a national duty.

The coast northward of the bungalow to Panichchankerni, Vakarai, Verugal, and especially from Ichchilampatai to Foul Point and Seruwawila, was little affected by any modern influences. Thinly populated – with a temporary migration during the south-west monsoon of fishermen from the west coast – it appeared as it would have centuries ago: lagoons, mangroves, a vast extent of jungle in the hinterland, rocky outcrops in forests and along the shore sticking out of the sea like monuments, coral reefs, the white beaches, venerable old trees, lonely temples and holy places.

From February to October there was almost permanent good weather, turning hot in May with the strong blowing of the warm kachan wind from the land. Blue sky, blue water, wide sandy beaches and the green fringe of ancient forest trees exemplified here the wonder of nearly untouched nature with man a small, well-fitting part of it – man and nature in balance. To add to all this, remarks Thilo, there is a wonderful smell of the flowering goda ratmal (Ixora arborea).

Seasonally the warm and calm water teems with tiny fluorescent organisms. At night the shallow waves running along the smooth shore light up like a moving illumination, and a swimming person is outlined with brightness in the clear water. Again, seasonally, the coastal jungle would be alive with swarms of fireflies sparkling at night, larger than elsewhere in the island.

At times, depending on climate and wind, the coastal water would be invaded by vast numbers of jellyfish. These beautiful, translucent creatures make swimming virtually impossible, not so much because of their sting but the unpleasant sensation of touch. Some, of course, are dangerous such as the Portuguese man-of-war which Thilo has observed on both the west and east coasts.

Also dangerous to bathers are the estuarine stingrays which seasonally bury themselves in the sand along the shallow shore and so become nearly invisible. They can inflict very painful wounds when trod upon.

In the 1970s much fuss was made about the sudden proliferation of the crown-of-thorns starfish, a beautiful blue and black inhabitant of tropical coral reefs. It was feared that the reefs would be destroyed. Panicked countermeasures were taken. The very people who were exploiting the reefs for the live fish trade were employed at great cost to spear and kill the starfish. The effect was the opposite of what was desired. The ‘blue stars’ were everywhere and visibly depleted the corals. In the early 1980s it all just died down, and in 1982 Thilo could not find a single crown-of-thorns in the extensive reefs around Thenaddi Bay.

During the north-east monsoon interesting items were washed ashore, for instance ambergris, a fatty grey substance, derived from sperm whales, and worth its weight in gold. On one occasion the part skeleton of a whale shark was left behind by the tide.

Twice, large fishing boats or rafts from Burma, across the Bay of Bengal, had been washed up on the wide beach near the bungalow. They were made of bamboo well tied together with string. A hut-like upper structure held a fireplace. Thilo found them unbelievably sturdy, intact after being storm-driven thousands of miles across the sea. Eventually both of them disintegrated on the wave-battered beach.

But, increasingly, ugly waste is also being swept ashore. Blobs of tar from boiler waste illegally discharged from passing ships, and literally millions of pieces of plastic in all colours and shapes originating from garbage on land and at sea now litter the sandy beaches.

(To be continued)

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Features

The gambling that wears a suit: Forex, commodities and CFD Trap – III

Published

24 hours ago

2026/09/16

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Prof. C. A. Saliya

(The third instalment in a five-part series on the business of gambling, legal and illegal.)

Somewhere in the fine print of every trading app you’ve ever seen advertised on social media, there’s a sentence that almost nobody reads all the way through. It usually says something like this: “77% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.”

Read that again. Not “some people lose money.” Not “trading carries risk.” Seventy-seven out of every hundred ordinary customers who sign up and put their own money in, lose it. And that number isn’t a scandal uncovered by an investigative journalist. It’s a legally required disclosure, printed by the company itself, sitting quietly at the bottom of the same advertisement promising you financial freedom.

Now imagine a casino was legally required to put a sign on its front door reading: “77 out of every 100 people who walk through this door will lose money.” Would anyone still walk in? Probably far fewer than they do today. And yet millions of people, a good number of them here in Sri Lanka, drawn in through Telegram groups, YouTube “gurus,” and slickly produced Instagram ads, open trading accounts every year, often with no idea that the product they’ve just signed up for behaves, mathematically, almost exactly like a casino game.

What a CFD actually is in plain language

CFD stands for “contract for difference.” Strip away the jargon and it means this: you’re not actually buying gold, or oil, or US dollars, or shares in a company. You’re placing a bet with a broker on whether the price of that thing will go up or down over some period of time, usually 24 hours. If you’re right, the broker pays you the difference. If you’re wrong, you pay them.

That alone isn’t necessarily gambling, plenty of legitimate financial hedging works this way. What tips it firmly into gambling territory is leverage. Most CFD and forex platforms let ordinary customers control a position many, many times larger than the money they’ve actually put in, sometimes 50 or 100 times larger. That sounds thrilling, because it means a small price move in your favour turns into a big profit. It also means a small price move against you wipes out your entire deposit in minutes, sometimes seconds. Currency and commodity prices wobble up and down constantly, for reasons that have nothing to do with any individual trader’s skill or analysis. Leverage simply turns that normal, everyday wobble into a coin flip with your rent money.

And underneath all of it sits something called the spread, the small gap between the price you can buy at and the price you can sell at. Every single trade you make, win or lose, hands the broker a slice through that spread. It costs the broker nothing to run more of them through the system. It is, in every meaningful sense, the exact same mechanism as a casino’s house edge on a roulette wheel, a guaranteed cut for the house, built into the game before a single card is dealt or a single trade is placed.

The numbers behind the disclosure

That 77 percent figure isn’t an outlier. Britain’s financial regulator found, in a review of the industry, that 82 percent of CFD customers lost money. Regulators across Europe studied 10 different countries and found the average retail customer lost somewhere between roughly €1,600 and €29,000 trading these products. Academic researchers, who have studied trading apps directly, including their “practice mode” demo accounts, found something else troubling: many of these apps are deliberately designed using the same psychological tricks as gambling apps. Near-miss messaging that makes a losing trade feel like it was almost a win. Streak counters. Push notifications nudging you back in right when you’ve stepped away. The researchers’ own conclusion was blunt: this “supports comparisons with gambling, where an overwhelming majority loses money.”

To be fair to the trading industry, it has a real counter-argument, and it deserves to be heard rather than dismissed. Genuine investing and trading, done properly, does involve skill, understanding a market, managing risk, not betting more than you can afford to lose, using regulated brokers who are supervised by real financial authorities. Nobody sensible would say buying shares in a well-run company is “gambling” in the same sense as a slot machine. The industry’s argument is that CFDs, used responsibly by informed traders, sit closer to that end of the spectrum than to a casino floor.

The trouble is that “used responsibly by informed traders” describes almost none of the customers these apps are actually advertising to. Nobody runs a slick Instagram campaign targeting sophisticated hedge fund managers. They target 19-year-olds with a bit of spare cash and a phone.

The Sri Lankan blind spot

Here is where this story becomes genuinely local, and genuinely urgent. Sri Lanka’s new gambling law, the one creating a single Gambling Regulatory Authority to oversee casinos, card games, and betting, has nothing to do with any of this. Forex and CFD trading falls under an entirely different part of the government’s rulebook, treated as a financial services matter for the Central Bank and securities regulators, not as gambling at all. On paper, that makes sense: trading involves real financial markets, real currencies, real commodities.

But in practice, it creates a gap you could drive a truck through. A card game at a funeral house, played for a few hundred rupees, falls under strict 19th-century anti-gambling law. A trading app that can empty a young person’s entire savings account in an afternoon, using exactly the same psychological hooks as a slot machine, falls under none of it, no age verification standard built for gambling harm, no loss limits, no cooling-off periods, no self-exclusion registers.

Meanwhile, unlicensed offshore forex “signal groups” and trading channels, plenty of them explicitly targeting Sri Lankan youth through Telegram and WhatsApp, operate almost entirely outside any meaningful oversight at all, local or foreign.

There’s a newer wrinkle worth a mention too: cryptocurrency trading and crypto-based gambling products increasingly blur into the exact same category as CFDs, some analysts value the global crypto gambling market in the tens of billions of dollars, though even the experts disagree wildly on the real number, which tells you how little anyone is actually tracking this corner of the industry closely.

The question this instalment leaves open

So here’s the question worth putting to Sri Lanka’s policymakers, and to readers thinking about their own accounts: if a product produces the same loss rates as a casino, uses the same psychological design as a betting app, and overwhelmingly targets the same young, inexperienced customers as illegal gambling operators, does it matter, for the purposes of protecting people, whether we call it “trading” or “gambling”? Right now, in Sri Lanka and in most of the world, the label is doing an enormous amount of legal work that the underlying product doesn’t actually earn.

We’ll return to this exact tension in our final instalment, when we ask what genuinely joined-up gambling regulation would look like, one that judges a product by what it does to the people using it, rather than by what its marketing department decided to call it.

Next week,

Part 4 heads to the racecourse, the one form of gambling that has stayed legal almost everywhere on Earth for centuries, to explain, in plain English, exactly how a bookmaker guarantees itself a profit no matter which horse crosses the line first.

Prof. C. A. Saliya, is a charted accountant, academic, researcher and former banker. He is the author of SAMAJA GAVESHAKAYA and Springer Publication DOING SOCIAL RESEARCH. He can be contacted at saliya.ca@gmail.com. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the organisations with which he is affiliated.

Features

Addressing human rights needs multi-pronged approach

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/15

Sahan Weerasooriya

Volker Türk

by Jehan Perera

The ongoing 63rd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which runs from September 7 to October 7, 2026, in Geneva is important to Sri Lanka. Its outcome will send a signal to other international actors, including the European Union, as to whether Sri Lanka’s reform policy is on track. The written update on Sri Lanka, prepared by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights under High Commissioner Volker Türk and presented by Deputy High Commissioner Nada Al-Nashif, has taken a more holistic approach to the government’s performance over the past year. It acknowledged the progress Sri Lanka has made under the NPP government in relation to accountability for financial fraud and other economic crimes. At the same time, the High Commissioner’s update made clear that progress in relation to economic crime cannot be equated with progress in relation to accountability for grave human rights violations committed during the armed conflict and in other periods of political violence.

The government may have felt sufficiently confident that its response to the High Commissioner’s update could be handled by its representative in Geneva and did not require the attendance of Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath. Sri Lanka’s representative Sumith Dassanayake called for a fundamental review of country-specific mandates within the UN Human Rights Council. Sri Lanka has been facing repeated scrutiny in the form of successive UNHRC resolutions from 2012 onwards. Ambassador Dassanayake argued that such mandates should not continue indefinitely and must be regularly assessed against measurable objectives and tangible outcomes. This may reflect confidence that its record of reform is beginning to receive recognition internationally. The reports and statements at the Human Rights Council acknowledged progress in the government’s efforts to address corruption and economic crime.

The government’s anti-corruption drive has included investigations into allegations involving individuals who held the highest political offices in the country. The arrest of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe in connection with alleged misuse of public funds, and the investigation into the controversial SriLankan Airlines Airbus transaction involving former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s son, are examples of the reach of these investigations. The arrest of SLPP National Organiser and Member of Parliament Namal Rajapaksa in connection with allegations relating to the Airbus purchase scandal has also demonstrated that the government is willing to pursue cases involving politically powerful figures.

Wide Range

The ongoing investigations appear to encompass a wide range of parliamentarians and government members, both past and present. They suggest that accountability for corruption is not being confined to lower-level officials or to individuals who lack political influence. This is precisely the kind of accountability that the public has long demanded and that previous governments have too often failed to deliver. The government is also reaching into the upper levels of the military hierarchies of the past. The case in which 11 young men, most of them Tamil, disappeared after being abducted in Colombo between 2008 and 2009 involved allegations that some families were asked to pay ransoms. The investigation into this case has reached senior military figures. The willingness to pursue such cases is important because it challenges the assumption that those who exercised power during the war are beyond the reach of the law. Such cases would provide a practical test of whether the government’s commitment to accountability for economic crimes is part of a broader commitment to the rule of law.

Success in prosecuting corruption cannot substitute for justice for those who were unlawfully killed, disappeared, tortured or otherwise victimised. The UN report noted that there had been no recognition or accountability for crimes under international law, gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law committed by all parties during the war. The government has yet to establish a credible and effective process to address the many cases of enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killing, torture and other serious violations. The government needs to take the international commitments it has inherited on human rights issues seriously. It needs to adopt a multi-pronged approach and go beyond focusing primarily on financial and corruption-related accountability.

Need Action

As a member of the international community, Sri Lanka has a responsibility to abide by the commitments it has made. It cannot selectively uphold international obligations postponing those that are politically difficult. Also, as a small country, Sri Lanka has a self-interest in ensuring the survival of international law, which is all that it has to protect it from the depredations of the bigger international actors. The erosion of international law by powerful states makes it all the more important that smaller states uphold the principles on which the international system is based. Sri Lanka cannot credibly appeal to international law when it is threatened from outside while disregarding its own obligations within. Sri Lanka also needs to win the confidence of its own population that it is committed to justice and equality for all. Public opinion polls and community-level research have disclosed that ethnic and religious minorities are appreciative of the sense of greater security they enjoy under the present government from ethnic or religious extremists.

But a sense of security is not the same as the fulfilment of rights. As far as the Tamil people are concerned, the government has yet to deliver on several of its specific promises. These include the long-standing problems of missing persons, the release of political prisoners who have been members of Tamil militant organisations, and the return of land taken over for military purposes during the war. The issue of Buddhist statues and archaeological sites found on their properties which are then taken from their control continue to trouble them especially as they see no signs of resolution of those disputes. The issue of pastureland in the east of the country in Mylathamadu is particularly concerning to them as they see orders by successive presidents, both President Ranil Wickremesinghe and President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, being disregarded on the ground. The Mylathamadu pastureland dispute is where traditional Tamil dairy farmers have engaged in multi-year protests against the ongoing encroachment of their ancestral grazing lands by Sinhalese crop cultivators relocated under government development schemes.

The government’s failure to hold Provincial Council elections is particularly troubling. The provincial council system is the only one that can provide the Tamil people and other ethnic minorities the opportunity to wield political power and exercise a measure of self-determination in the areas in which they are the numerical majority. The continued postponement of Provincial Council elections therefore has consequences that go beyond an ordinary electoral delay. It deprives communities of an important constitutional avenue for democratic participation and power-sharing. The ethnic and religious minorities appreciate what the government is doing in the larger national interest, but they must not be made to feel that their special concerns are being ignored. The government cannot resolve Sri Lanka’s entire legacy of rights violations overnight. But it does need to demonstrate that it is willing to move forward on multiple fronts, not only on a few.

Features

The emptying university: why are academics leaving?

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/15

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Hasini Lecamwasam

Brain drain in Sri Lanka is at an all-time high. The latest Human Flight and Brain Drain Index for 2024 shows that we are 16^th of 175 countries on this count, and first in South Asia. That this is a crisis goes without saying. Brain drain affects all sectors, and is a huge strain on the resources of a developing country. Particularly in Sri Lanka, where considerable public investment is made in the moulding of professionals through the system of free education, this amounts to transferring the resources of poorer countries to richer ones with top migration destinations. It is, therefore, important to consider the push and pull factors behind skilled outmigration, specifically from the public university system of Sri Lanka, a key focus of the Kuppi column.

From frustration to exit

Several bitter realities in our crumbling public university system act as push factors in the migration decisions of academics. Many essays on this column have, over several years, attempted to highlight numerous aspects of this erosion. Perhaps, primary among them is the lack of adequate funding, which has debilitating ramifications for the system: very little investment is made in the up-keep of infrastructure (and even less in its expansion), resulting in serious constraints in accommodating growing batches of students and the wellbeing of the staff (particularly in regional universities); research funding is negligible, severely curtailing academics’ ability to effectively discharge their primary duty of teaching which should ideally be informed by their research (and the research of others, access to which is also, unfortunately, mediated by funding); a funding crunch also means a slash in (or greater constraints on) recruitments, increasing the workloads of academics, currently in service, and eating into the quality of their teaching and research.

What recruitments are done frustrate those with any faith in merit. As many of our interventions in this column have shown, recruitment processes are characterised by archaic selection criteria that place very little weight on a candidate’s postgraduate growth and the advantages of interdisciplinary training. Added to this is the general preference for ‘culturally compliant’ candidates who would not rock the boat too much. The combined effect is that those with the capacity and spirit to try out innovations in education are discouraged from joining or staying on in the public university system. Some, or many, of them may instead seek appointments abroad.

A thread that binds all of these problems together is pervasive hierarchy which, again, many interventions on this column have sought to highlight. It is the interest in preserving hierarchy that leads to the preference for alumni in recruitment processes. Hierarchy within universities can be particularly frustrating for younger faculty and women, who typically have to bear the brunt of the workload of their senior, often male, colleagues. In a context of funding, and, therefore, recruitment, restrictions, this translates into a disproportionate burden being placed on junior (usually female) faculty, seriously hindering their prospects of growing into successful academics due to the time constraints within which they have to operate. Junior academics, therefore, are more likely to look to educational institutions abroad for what they hope would be a different work culture that respects them more.

Ideological ruses

On top of these structural frustrations are also the workings of neoliberal ideology. For one, the nature of relations between the global metropole and peripheral countries like Sri Lanka largely dictates what is desirable and what is not. The apparent lifestyles of Western countries – from food to clothing, housing, appliances, and so on – have continued to lure people from the periphery with the promise of a ‘better’ life, alongside better career advancement opportunities. This, of course, masks much of the struggle that goes on behind the scenes to survive in Western societies. For instance, in most cases highly attractive public infrastructure such as roads, public transport, clean air, quality control of food, and so on belie the astronomical privatised costs of healthcare and education. Health insurance is usually mandatory and steep in most high-income settings, while even subsidised education (for which eligibility criteria are strict) creates a serious dent in household earnings. Of course, the happy images of glossy trams and gleeful international travellers don’t convey this.

A second ideological ruse is the myth of greater opportunities and recognition abroad. While there is no denying that local skilled sectors – be it higher education, health, civil service, or private white-collar positions – are replete with issues that inhibit merit-based professional advancement, the notion that things are fundamentally different in Western countries stems from an uninformed optimism. As is now increasingly known and discussed, Western labour markets are notoriously racialised, and equivalent skills are rarely treated as such. Instead, it is usually demanded that skilled migrants clear certain formal examinations in their host countries. In fields like medicine, this is followed by an interview that may also be racially prejudiced. Once these initial steps are cleared, remuneration reverts to square one irrespective of experience accumulated abroad, not to mention the many subtle aggressions, rejections, and trials one has to go through in the negotiation of everyday life. In the many cases where professional qualifications are used as leverage for a move abroad, sights are set on a better future for one’s children, which again is informed by the misplaced faith in greater opportunities and a lack of awareness of the factors outlined above. Needless to say, in the global swing to the Right, things have become even more challenging. In such a context, considering the few rare cases where skilled migrants live extremely comfortable lives as the norm becomes a dangerous misconception.

The two ideological pull factors mentioned above are complemented by a push factor, which has to do with a highly classed understanding of what a white-collar professional is due in their society. Many of these aspirations are clearly articulated in academic trade union action demanding separate quotas for school entry, increased fuel allowances, winning back the presently stalled vehicle permit scheme, salary hikes, and so on. While working people have every right to agitate for better material conditions, insofar as it remains unconnected to a broader movement for improving the conditions of the lot of the working class, it remains self-serving and very much within the class logic of capitalist society. Since these demands are articulated as a means of maintaining distinction, it is clear that they are not envisaged as part of a class movement. The frustration of not having these needs for distinction satisfied may push some to seek greener pastures abroad, at least financially, (perhaps as a means of social mobility based on it), only to be disappointed on most occasions.

What is to be done?

Addressing the systemic push factors listed above requires, first and foremost, greater allocations for free public higher education. This would immediately translate into more recruitments and less work per academic, and better research and teaching in the long haul. An increase in funding would also ideally lead to greater infrastructural investments, especially including improving the living conditions of those who work in regional universities amid untold hardships. Next, fairer, more creative, and, therefore, more effective recruitment policies are badly needed to attract talented individuals to university positions. Rather than carving out a ‘special category’ for academics to achieve this purpose, which is informed by a classed logic, this needs to be done through fundamental reforms in recruitment processes. Third, a persistent attack on the entrenched hierarchy within universities through internal reform is much called for. Reforming recruitment practices will go a long way towards addressing this. Measures should also be taken to introduce more stringent policies against SGBV (not to mention ragging, even though it is not directly connected to brain drain). Such measures would create a safer, fairer, and more attractive workplace, which would give more reasons for people to stay.

On top of greater allocations, we also need a transformation of our aspirations themselves if this situation is to change. That necessitates a kind of education capable of questioning the ‘paradise’ conception of Western societies, and lays bare their colonial material and ideological dimensions, in both their historical and contemporary manifestations. These colonial understandings of the ‘good life’, moreover, have devastating ecological implications for the planet, not to mention social justice. An education with the ability to transform this mindset would hopefully prove to be more than a mere path to social mobility, rather being a tool of social emancipation that renders mobility moot.

(Hasini Lecamwasam is with the Department of Political Science, University of Peradeniya)

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