Features
The # 1 Sri Lankan Hotel Company in 2023
CONFESSIONS OF A GLOBAL GYPSY
Dr. Chandana (Chandi) Jayawardena DPhil
President – Chandi J. Associates Inc. Consulting, Canada
Founder & Administrator – Global Hospitality Forum
chandij@sympatico.ca
Acknowledgement
I thank Mr. Gemunu Goonewardena, Chairman of the Tourist Hotels Classification Committee from 2018 to 2022, and Non-Executive Director of the Board of Aitken Spence Hotel Holding PLC, for his assistance to me in collecting current data.
Hotels Rooms in Sri Lanka in 2023
All types of accommodation are available in Sri Lanka for tourism, including hotels classified by the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority (SLTDA), unclassified accommodation, bungalows etc. The total capacity is now over 48,000 rooms in 3,657 units. This is including the upcoming 2023 opening of the largest hotel in Sri Lanka – the 800-room Cinnamon Life Colombo. With that, the total number of classified hotels (one to five star) rooms in Sri Lanka will soon reach 15,642 in 160 hotels.
In 2023, five hotel companies operated over half of the room stock in Sri Lanka, which are within their 56 (generally, larger) hotels as indicated in the table below. The other half of the rooms are within the balance 104 (generally, smaller) hotels. A small number of rooms in bungalows managed by a few of these companies were not considered for this calculation.
All three top Sri Lankan hotel companies – Cinnamon, Heritance and Jetwing entered the hotel industry around the same period, 50 years ago. With the opening of Life in 2023, in terms of total room capacity, the Cinnamon brand of John Keells Group will surpass Heritance and associated brands (including 500-room RIU partnership) of Aitken Spence Group.
With a successful operation of 10 hotels in three other countries (The Maldives, India and Oman) Aitken Spence Group will continue to compete aggressively in terms of the total number of hotels and rooms operated by a Sri Lankan company. Their main achievements include opening the first five-star resort hotel in Sri Lanka in 1982 – Triton and a decade later opening multi-award-winning, iconic hotel – Kandalama. The company with the largest number of hotels in Sri Lanka – Jetwing operates a chain of 20 hotels with different and interesting themes. The rest of this article focuses on the # 1 Sri Lankan Hotel company — Cinnamon.
Cinnamon Hotel Brand in 2023
Over the last five decades, John Keells Group operated their hotel management company under different names. In 1970s as Walkers Tours Hotels, in 1980s as Hotel Management & Marketing Services Limited, and in 1990s as John Keells Hotels. In the year 2005, they rebranded their hotel chain as Cinnamon. In 2023, Cinnamon is the largest hotel company in Sri Lanka. They also have four hotels in the Maldives.
With the opening of their 16th hotel – Cinnamon Life, the hotel company will have a room stock of 3,288 in Sri Lanka and The Maldives. Both in terms of the quality of the hotels and the quantity of the room stock, Cinnamon is arguably the greatest hotel company in Sri Lanka, today.
Cinnamon Hotel’s most ambitious project – Cinnamon Life Colombo is the first integrated resort in Sri Lanka and the largest private investment in the country. Sri Lankan-British architect, Cecil Balmond designed the resort while Hyundai Engineering & Construction is the main contractor. The construction of the resort began nine years ago. This 47-floor complex, includes 800 five-star hotel rooms, a retail and entertainment complex, large conference venues, a 30-storey office tower and two separate residential towers with 427 luxury apartments. Cinnamon Life Complex promises vibrant, innovative, futuristic and unique elements. It is expected to be an icon that will redefine Colombo’s skyline.
My Connections with Walkers Tours/John Keells from 1973 to 1993
By early 1970s, Walkers Tours & Travels Limited (later rebranded Walkers Tours) became the leading tour operator in Ceylon. It was founded in 1969. Soon, they represented two of the largest European tour operators, from West Germany and Denmark, who were actively promoting tourism in Sri Lanka.
A young lawyer, Sriyantha (Simon) Senaratne was appointed as the Managing Director of Walkers Tours in 1971. When Walkers Tours was acquired by John Keells Group of companies in 1972, he continued in that position for seven more years. As a part of the vision of the Managing Director, Walkers Tours entered the hotel industry in 1973 with a unique project in a remote area — Habarana, and soon became the leader in hotel management in Sri Lanka.
Prior to my departure from Sri Lanka to pursue my global career in early 1994, for the first two decades of this iconic hotel company, I was connected with them in various capacities. My direct and indirect roles with them included serving tourist groups and representatives of Walkers Tours as a waiter, barman, cook, trainee chef, executive chef, food & beverage manager, hotel manager, operations manager of the corporate office of the hotel company, and finally as the general manager of their two largest hotels in the 1980s. In later years, while working for other companies in Sri Lanka such as Le Galadari Meridien and Mount Lavinia Hotel, my teams depended largely on tourist traffic from Walkers Tours.
I am most thankful to Walkers Tours/John Keells Group for giving me valuable opportunities. They allowed me to experience at a young age, various senior operational positions and leadership tasks during the early years of my career in the hotel industry. My direct and indirect connections with this largest group of companies in Sri Lanka over a period of 20 years, can be summarized as:
1973 – Bentota Beach Hotel
First, I was associated with operational people and tour guides attached to Walkers Tours in 1973 while working as a trainee waiter, barman and cook on one of my Ceylon Hotel School (CHS) internships. It was at what was then the best resort hotel in Sri Lanka – Bentota Beach Hotel. Soon after my graduation from CHS in 1974 I was recruited by Bentota Beach as the Trainee Executive Chef. In that role for a year, I associated with more Walkers Tours groups and Resident Managers and Tour Managers.
Bentota Beach was a popular meeting place for many young hoteliers from over a dozen of new hotels in Bentota and Beruwala. In 1975 at a hotelier’s party, I met Jayantha Silva who had been recruited to manage the first hotel to be operated by Walkers Tours – Hotel Swanee.
1975 – Coral Gardens Hotel
After a year, I was transferred with the promotion of Executive Chef (and Assistant Manager) of the sister hotel of Bentota Beach Hotel – Coral Gardens. There, I took my relationships with Walkers tour leaders to a new level. On most days, we catered for an additional 150 to 200 tourists who visited Coral Gardens Hotel only for lunch during their island-wide round trip with Walkers Tours. In consultation with the tour leaders, I planned standard, three-course lunch menus that could be prepared and served quickly, after their glass-bottom boat excursions to see beautiful coral gardens, Hikkaduwa was famous for.
I met an innovative and ambitious, young hotelier — Bobby Adams for the first time in 1975, two weeks prior to his departure from Coral Gardens, when I succeeded him. Bobby who was the Assistant Manager of Coral Gardens Hotel was joining Walkers Tours to open The Village, Habarana – the first hotel to be built by Walkers Tours. Just before Bobby opened The Village in 1976 as its Manager, Bobby called me from Habarana, “Chandi, why don’t you join me as the Executive Chef at The Village?” he asked. However, at that point, I did not accept his offer. A few years later, I worked for Bobby twice. When I married in 1980, he was my best-man. When I was 27, I became his deputy at John Keells. Bobby was the first Director – Operations for hotels at their corporate office.
1977 – One Week Tour with Walkers Tours
In the summer of 1977, Walkers Tours decided to organize a one-week-long coach tour around Sri Lanka for representatives from all hotels in Sri Lanka providing rooms to their clients. As the Assistant Manager and Executive Chef, I represented Coral Gardens Hotel in this tour. It turned out to be a fun-filled, thank you tour. It was a great, public relations initiative by Walkers Tours with their hotel industry partners.
Most members of the top team of Walkers Tours joined this trip. They included Sri Lankan travel trade legends such as Norman Impett and Nevil Arnolda. They were both Directors of Walkers Tours. I also got to be better acquainted with prominent, younger members of Walkers Tours family, such as Bobby Jordan and Jansi Ponniah, who joined the trip. They both were very friendly, efficient, dynamic and well-connected with the hotel industry.
The highlight of the tour was spending a couple of days at their then flagship hotel – The Village, Habarana. By then, Walkers Tours had a number of hotel management agreements, was managing Hotel Swanee, and was taking over the management of Hotel Ceysands. They were in the early stages of planning a hotel in Kandy which was called Kandy Walkinn (which years later opened as Hotel Citadel). My friend Bobby Adams was very happy to see me again. Both of us sat at the ‘Don Martin’s bar at The Village and had a long chat over a couple of drinks. Bobby was very convincing. “Chandi, you must join Walkers Tours, now!” he insisted.
1977 – Hotel Ceysands
The day after the one-week coach tour with Walkers Tours, Captain D. A Wickramasinghe (Captain Wicks, who later became my father-in-law), the new General Manager of Hotel Ceysands called and met with me. He explained that Walkers Tours had taken over the Hotel Ceysands management from the owners — Ceylinco Group. After a pause, Captain Wicks said, “Chandana, we are expecting 100% occupancy from the first of November, 1977 for six months. We need a good professional like you to join us at least by the first of October, to organize the kitchen, restaurant and bars within a month.”
Soon after that, I joined Walkers Tours as the Food & Beverage Manager and Executive Chef of Hotel Ceysands. At that time, I met Walkers Tours Managing Director – Sriyantha (Simon) Senaratna, and the Finance Director – Priya Edirisinghe, who handled the hotel expansion projects.
1979 – Swanee
Hotel Swanee wasn’t a well-planned, developed hotel. However, when Walkers Tours took over the hotel in 1975, they wisely invested in major upgrades for the hotel. They hired respected professionals such as Bevis Bawa, to upgrade and maintain the landscaping.
As the first hotel to be managed by Walkers Tours/John Keells, it was also an important learning journey for the group. In 1979 at the age of 25, I was proud to be promoted to be the Manager of Hotel Swanee. John Keells Group Chairman, Mark Bostock was very fond of me and arranged my first overseas training in his country (England) with Trust House Forte.
1980 – An Offer from a new Rival Company
I was surprised when Somaratne Silva invited me to his house in Colombo to discuss the Manger job offer for me to open Sigiriya Village, which was expected to be the main competitor for The Village Habarana. He was such an interesting man.
He talked about his training in the Netherlands, his work experience in hotels there, his recommending Bobby Adams for The Village and his positive observations about my work at Hotel Ceysands and Hotel Swanee. I nearly accepted that job, but eventually decided to continue with John Keells.
1980 – Ambalangoda Rest House
By 1980, Walkers Tours/John Keells was expanding its hospitality business by acquiring some smaller properties with management contracts. The group opened their second hotel in Beruwala — Hotel Bayroo, on a management contract, in the midst of various obstacles created by the village thugs. In addition to managing Hotel Swanee, I was asked to take over the Ambalangoda Rest House, to reorganize and improve its standards and to manage it.
1981 – Hotel Management & Marketing Services Limited
At the beginning of 1981, I was promoted again and was transferred to the John Keells corporate office in Colombo. I was the second in command of Walkers Tours/John Keells’ hotel company — Hotel Management & Marketing Services Limited (HMMS), as the deputy to Bobby Adams.
1981 – Temple Trees
Mainly owing to a personal relationship Bobby Adams had with then Prime Minister, R. Premadasa, the group commenced managing the Prime Minister’s official residence — Temple Trees. I released one of the departmental managers from Hotel Swanee — Fazal Izzadeen to become the Manager of Temple Trees.
1981 – Ceylinco Hotel
In Colombo, we had negotiated to take over the management of Ceylinco Hotel. “Chandi, I would like you to take over the management of Ceylinco Hotel and re-organize it”, Bobby informed me. He knew that I had a personal friendship with the Ceylinco Group Chairman, Lalith Kotalawala, which was useful in taking over Ceylinco Hotel.
1981 – Representing Walkers Tours as the Group Executive Chef in Hong Kong
In the midst of my busy schedule with HMMS, Bobby Adams entrusted me, on short notice, with a special assignment in Hong Kong. He wanted me to quickly plan and organize a large Sri Lankan and Maldivian food festival at the Hotel Furama InterContinental, Hong Kong. It was an important, two-week tourism promotional festival, in partnership with a number of organizations. They were represented by well-known leaders of the tourist industry, such as M. Y. M. Thahir of Walkers Tours, Pani Seneviratne of Ceylon Tourist Board, and Ahamed Didi of Universal Resorts, The Maldives.
1985 – The Village & The Lodge
Soon after my return from England in 1985, upon completing my graduate studies in International Hotel Management, I re-joined John Keells Group. I was appointed as the General Manager of their largest two hotels – The Village and The Lodge. I reported to Bobby Adams, and also worked closely on rates and financial aspects with Vivendra Lintotawela, who later became the Chairman of John Keells Holdings. On a day when all 260 rooms in both hotels were occupied, my management team in Habarana led providing hospitality and meals to 1,000 people — 520 guests, 120 tourist drivers and 360 employees.
In The Village, Somaratna Silva had cleverly created a rustic resort with an open concept with individual rooms appearing like small houses in a remote village. In The Lodge, two young Architects — Pheroze Choksy and Ismeth Rahim — continued the open concept, but with more sophistication. The end result was simply a masterpiece of architecture in two sister hotels, blending beautifully with nature, and the seamless delivery of world class hospitality.
John Keells/Walkers Tours, had created two iconic resorts, which were simply a delight for any hotelier to operate. I was fortunate to get that opportunity.
1985 – Habarana Farm
In addition to managing the two resorts in Habarana, I managed a large farm with the assistance of a qualified farm manager who reported to me. The farm cultivated vegetables and fruits to supply both resorts and used kitchen food waste to feed around 35 pigs raised on the farm.
1986 – Keels Food Product Distribution Operation
One day the Managing Director of Walkers Tours, Ken Balendra (later, the first Sri Lankan to be appointed as the Chairman of John Keells Holdings) called me and asked, “Chandana, don’t you have unused cold room facilities at The Lodge?” When I confirmed that we did, he assigned me some additional duties. “Look Chandana, we are commencing a new company – Keells Food Products, initially with mainly meat products. Our vision is to eventually make it the largest such company in Sri Lanka. We would like you to set up the food distribution network for Keells Food Products in the North Central Province.” I immediately hired a Food Distribution Coordinator, bought a large refrigerated van and commenced food distribution.
1986-1989 and 1990-1993
During my three years as the Director of Food & Beverage of the 500-room five-star Le Galadari Meridien Hotel in Colombo from 1986 to 1989, I realized the influence Walkers Tours had with most of the hotels in Sri Lanka. My colleague, Chandra Mohotti, the Director of Room Division of the hotel treated anyone from Walkers Tours as royalty, as their group business was valuable.
During my three years as the General Manager of Mount Lavinia Hotel from 1990 to 1993 we depended heavily on group bookings from Walkers Tours. I enjoyed working with them very closely, especially during the tour group contract negotiations held in Berlin, Milan and London during major travel trade events (ITB, BIT and WTM). After work we all socialized until the early hours in the morning. Those were memorable days.
I left Sri Lanka permanently in early 1994 to focus on my global career. Therefore, I had no direct connections with Walkers Tours/John Keells for nearly 30 years. However, during those three decades, when I visited Sri Lanka over 35 times as a tourist, as a guest of a few of their hotels, I continued to be impressed with the visionary developments, ambitious takeovers, innovative expansions and creative re-branding of the hotel business of Walkers Tours/John Keells.
Many board members and professional hoteliers have contributed to this remarkable journey, having many unprecedented successes. In spite of various macro level challenges such as the 26-year civil war from 1983 to 2009, Walkers Tours/John Keells hotels managed to survive and progress.
How Did Everything Start in 1973?
At the end of the day, it is still important to understand the humble beginnings of this hotel company and appreciate the pioneers who commenced that amazing journey… Continuing next week, with a question-and-answer format with the visionary leader who steered Walkers Tours to enter the hotel industry 50 years ago.
In a village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, a woman receives a small but steady sum each month – not wages, for she has no formal job, but an unconditional cash transfer from the government.
Premila Bhalavi says the money covers medicines, vegetables and her son’s school fees. The sum, 1,500 rupees ($16: £12), may be small, but its effect – predictable income, a sense of control and a taste of independence – is anything but.
Her story is increasingly common. Across India, 118 million adult women in 12 states now receive unconditional cash transfers from their governments, making India the site of one of the world’s largest and least-studied social-policy experiments.
Long accustomed to subsidising grain, fuel and rural jobs, India has stumbled into something more radical: paying adult women simply because they keep households running, bear the burden of unpaid care and form an electorate too large to ignore.
Eligibility filters vary – age thresholds, income caps and exclusions for families with government employees, taxpayers or owners of cars or large plots of land.
“The unconditional cash transfers signal a significant expansion of Indian states’ welfare regimes in favour of women,” Prabha Kotiswaran, a professor of law and social justice at King’s College London, told the BBC.
The transfers range from 1,000-2,500 rupees ($12-$30) a month – meagre sums, worth roughly 5-12% of household income, but regular. With 300 million women now holding bank accounts, transfers have become administratively simple.
Women typically spend the money on household and family needs – children’s education, groceries, cooking gas, medical and emergency expenses, retiring small debts and occasional personal items like gold or small comforts.
What sets India apart from Mexico, Brazil or Indonesia – countries with large conditional cash-transfer schemes – is the absence of conditions: the money arrives whether or not a child attends school or a household falls below the poverty line.
Goa was the first state to launch an unconditional cash transfer scheme to women in 2013. The phenomenon picked up just before the pandemic in 2020, when north-eastern Assam rolled out a scheme for vulnerable women. Since then these transfers have turned into a political juggernaut.
The recent wave of unconditional cash transfers targets adult women, with some states acknowledging their unpaid domestic and care work. Tamil Nadu frames its payments as a “rights grant” while West Bengal’s scheme similarly recognises women’s unpaid contributions.
In other states, the recognition is implicit: policymakers expect women to use the transfers for household and family welfare, say experts.
This focus on women’s economic role has also shaped politics: in 2021, Tamil actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan promised “salaries for housewives”. (His fledgling party lost.) By 2024, pledges of women-focused cash transfers helped deliver victories to political parties in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Odisha, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh.
In the recent elections in Bihar, the political power of cash transfers was on stark display. In the weeks before polling in the country’s poorest state, the government transferred 10,000 rupees ($112; £85) to 7.5 million female bank accounts under a livelihood-generation scheme. Women voted in larger numbers than men, decisively shaping the outcome.
Critics called it blatant vote-buying, but the result was clear: women helped the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition secure a landslide victory. Many believe this cash infusion was a reminder of how financial support can be used as political leverage.
Yet Bihar is only one piece of a much larger picture. Across India, unconditional cash transfers are reaching tens of millions of women on a regular basis.
Maharashtra alone promises benefits for 25 million women; Odisha’s scheme reaches 71% of its female voters.
In some policy circles, the schemes are derided as vote-buying freebies. They also put pressure on state finances: 12 states are set to spend around $18bn on such payouts this fiscal year. A report by think-tank PRS Legislative Research notes that half of these states face revenue deficits – this happens when a state borrows to pay regular expenses without creating assets.
But many argue they also reflect a slow recognition of something India’s feminists have argued for decades: the economic value of unpaid domestic and care work.
Women in India spent nearly five hours a day on such work in 2024 – more than three times the time spent by men, according to the latest Time Use Survey. This lopsided burden helps explain India’s stubbornly low female labour-force participation. The cash transfers, at least, acknowledge the imbalance, experts say.
Do they work?
Evidence is still thin but instructive. A 2025 study in Maharashtra found that 30% of eligible women did not register – sometimes because of documentation problems, sometimes out of a sense of self-sufficiency. But among those who did, nearly all controlled their own bank accounts.
A 2023 survey in West Bengal found that 90% operated their accounts themselves and 86% decided how to spend the money. Most used it for food, education and medical costs; hardly transformative, but the regularity offered security and a sense of agency.
More detailed work by Prof Kotiswaran and colleagues shows mixed outcomes.
In Assam, most women spent the money on essentials; many appreciated the dignity it afforded, but few linked it to recognition of unpaid work, and most would still prefer paid jobs.
In Tamil Nadu, women getting the money spoke of peace of mind, reduced marital conflict and newfound confidence – a rare social dividend. In Karnataka, beneficiaries reported eating better, gaining more say in household decisions and wanting higher payments.
Yet only a sliver understood the scheme as compensation for unpaid care work; messaging had not travelled. Even so, women said the money allowed them to question politicians and manage emergencies. Across studies, the majority of women had full control of the cash.
“The evidence shows that the cash transfers are tremendously useful for women to meet their own immediate needs and those of their households. They also restore dignity to women who are otherwise financially dependent on their husbands for every minor expense,” Prof Kotiswaran says.
Importantly, none of the surveys finds evidence that the money discourages women from seeking paid work or entrench gender roles – the two big feminist fears, according to a report by Prof Kotiswaran along with Gale Andrew and Madhusree Jana.
Nor have they reduced women’s unpaid workload, the researchers find. They do, however, strengthen financial autonomy and modestly strengthen bargaining power. They are neither panacea nor poison: they are useful but limited tools, operating in a patriarchal society where cash alone cannot undo structural inequities.
What next?
The emerging research offers clear hints.
Eligibility rules should be simplified, especially for women doing heavy unpaid care work. Transfers should remain unconditional and independent of marital status.
But messaging should emphasise women’s rights and the value of unpaid work, and financial-literacy efforts must deepen, researchers say. And cash transfers cannot substitute for employment opportunities; many women say what they really want is work that pays and respect that endures.
“If the transfers are coupled with messaging on the recognition of women’s unpaid work, they could potentially disrupt the gendered division of labour when paid employment opportunities become available,” says Prof Kotiswaran.
India’s quiet cash transfers revolution is still in its early chapters. But it already shows that small, regular sums – paid directly to women – can shift power in subtle, significant ways.
Whether this becomes a path to empowerment or merely a new form of political patronage will depend on what India chooses to build around the money.
[BBC]
Some opposition political parties have striven hard to turn the disaster of Cyclone Ditwah to their advantage. A calamity of such unanticipated proportions ought to have enabled all political parties to come together to deal with this tragedy. Failure to do so would indicate both political and moral bankruptcy. The main issue they have forcefully brought up is the government’s failure to take early action on the Meteorological Department’s warnings. The Opposition even convened a meeting of their own with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe and other senior politicians who shared their experience of dealing with natural and man-made disasters of the past, and the present government’s failures to match them.
The difficulty to anticipate the havoc caused by the cyclone was compounded by the neglect of the disaster management system, which includes previous governments that failed to utilise the allocated funds in an open, transparent and corruption free manner. Land designated as “Red Zones” by the National Building Research Organisation (NBRO), a government research and development institute, were built upon by people and ignored by successive governments, civil society and the media alike. NBRO was established in 1984. According to NBRO records, the decision to launch a formal “Landslide Hazard Zonation Mapping Project (LHMP)” dates from 1986. The institutional process of identifying landslide-prone slopes, classifying zones (including what we today call “Red Zones”), and producing hazard maps, started roughly 35 to 40 years ago.
Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines which were lashed by cyclones at around the same time as Sri Lanka experienced Cyclone Ditwah were also unprepared and also suffered enormously. The devastation caused by cyclones in the larger southeast Asian region is due to global climate change. During Cyclone Ditwah some parts of the central highlands received more than 500 mm of rainfall. Official climatological data cite the average annual rainfall for Sri Lanka as roughly 1850 mm though this varies widely by region: from around 900 mm in the dry zones up to 5,000 mm in wet zones. The torrential rains triggered by Ditwah were so heavy that for some communities they represented a rainfall surge comparable to a major part of their typical annual rainfall.
Inclusive Approach
Climate change now joins the pantheon of Sri Lanka’s challenges that are beyond the ability of a single political party or government to resolve. It is like the economic bankruptcy, ethnic conflict and corruption in governance that requires an inclusive approach in which the Opposition, civil society, religious society and the business community need to join rather than merely criticise the government. It will be in their self-interest to do so. A younger generation (Gen Z), with more energy and familiarity with digital technologies filled, the gaps that the government was unable to fill and, in a sense, made both the Opposition and traditional civil society redundant.
Within hours of news coming in that floods and landslides were causing havoc to hundreds of thousands of people, a people’s movement for relief measures was underway. There was no one organiser or leader. There were hundreds who catalysed volunteers to mobilise to collect resources and to cook meals for the victims in community kitchens they set up. These community kitchens sprang up in schools, temples, mosques, garages and even roadside stalls. Volunteers used social media to crowdsource supplies, match donors with delivery vehicles, and coordinate routes that had become impassable due to fallen trees or mudslides. It was a level of commitment and coordination rarely achieved by formal institutions.
The spontaneous outpouring of support was not only a youth phenomenon. The larger population, too, contributed to the relief effort. The Galle District Secretariat sent 23 tons of rice to the cyclone affected areas from donations brought by the people. The Matara District Secretariat made arrangements to send teams of volunteers to the worst affected areas. Just as in the Aragalaya protest movement of 2022, those who joined the relief effort were from all ethnic and religious communities. They gave their assistance to anyone in need, regardless of community. This showed that in times of crisis, Sri Lankans treat others without discrimination as human beings, not as members of specific communities.
Turning Point
The challenge to the government will be to ensure that the unity among the people that the cyclone disaster has brought will outlive the immediate relief phase and continue into the longer term task of national reconstruction. There will be a need to rethink the course of economic development to ensure human security. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has spoken about the need to resettle all people who live above 5000 feet and to reforest those areas. This will require finding land for resettlement elsewhere. The resettlement of people in the hill country will require that the government address the issue of land rights for the Malaiyaha Tamils.
Since independence the Malaiyaha Tamils have been collectively denied ownership to land due first to citizenship issues and now due to poverty and unwillingness of plantation managements to deal with these issues in a just and humanitarian manner beneficial to the workers. Their resettlement raises complex social, economic and political questions. It demands careful planning to avoid repeating past mistakes where displaced communities were moved to areas lacking water, infrastructure or livelihoods. It also requires political consensus, as land is one of the most contentious issues in Sri Lanka, tied closely to identity, ethnicity and historical grievances. Any sustainable solution must go beyond temporary relocation and confront the historical exclusion of the Malaiyaha Tamil community, whose labour sustains the plantation economy but who remain among the poorest groups in the country.
Cyclone Ditwah has thus become a turning point. It has highlighted the need to strengthen governance and disaster preparedness, but it has also revealed a different possibility for Sri Lanka, one in which the people lead with humanity and aspire for the wellbeing of all, and the political leadership emulates their example. The people have shown through their collective response to Cyclone Ditwah that unity and compassion remain strong, which a sincere, moral and hardworking government can tap into. The challenge to the government will be to ensure that the unity among the people that the cyclone disaster has brought will outlive the immediate relief phase and continue into the longer term task of national reconstruction with political reconciliation.
by Jehan Perera
In the short span of two or three days, Cyclone Ditwah, has caused a disaster of unprecedented proportions in our midst. Lashing away at almost the entirety of the country, it has broken through the ramparts of centuries old structures and eroded into areas, once considered safe and secure.
The rains may have passed us by. The waters will recede, shops will reopen, water will be in our taps, and we can resume the daily grind of life. But it will not be the same anymore; it should not be. It should not be business as usual for any of us, nor for the government. Within the past few years, Sri Lankan communities have found themselves in the middle of a crisis after crisis, both natural and man-made, but always made acute by the myopic policies of successive governments, and fuelled by the deeply hierarchical, gendered and ethnicised divides that exist within our societies. The need of the hour for the government today is to reassess its policies and rethink the directions the country, as a whole, has been pushed into.
Neoliberal disaster
In the aftermath of the devastation caused by the natural disaster, fundamental questions have been raised about our existence. Our disaster is, in whole or in part, the result of a badly and cruelly managed environment of the planet. Questions have been raised about the nature of our economy. We need to rethink the way land is used. Livelihoods may have to be built anew, promoting people’s welfare, and by deveoloping a policy on climate change. Mega construction projects is a major culprit as commentators have noted. Landslides in the upcountry are not merely a result of Ditwah lashing at our shores and hills, but are far more structural and points to centuries of mismanagement of land. (https://island.lk/weather-disasters-sri-lanka-flooded-by-policy-blunders-weak-enforcement-and-environmental-crime-climate-expert/). It is also about the way people have been shunted into lands, voluntarily or involuntarily, that are precarious, in their pursuit of a viable livelihood, within the limited opportunities available to them.
Neo liberal policies that demand unfettered land appropriation and built on the premise of economic growth at any expense, leading to growing rural-urban divides, need to be scrutinised for their short and long term consequences. And it is not that any of these economic drives have brought any measure of relief and rejuvenation of the economy. We have been under the tyrannical hold of the IMF, camouflaged as aid and recovery, but sinking us deeper into the debt trap. In October 2025, Ahilan Kadirgamar writes, that the IMF programme by the end of 2027, “will set up Sri Lanka for the next crisis.” He also lambasts the Central Bank and the government’s fiscal policy for their punishing interest rates in the context of disinflation and rising poverty levels. We have had to devalue the rupee last month, and continue to rely on the workforce of domestic workers in West Asia as the major source of foreign exchange. The government’s negotiations with the IMF have focused largely on relief and infrastructure rebuilding, despite calls from civil society, demanding debt justice.
The government has unabashedly repledged its support for the big business class. The cruelest cut of them all is the appointment of a set of high level corporate personalities to the post-disaster recovery committee, with the grand name, “Rebuilding Sri Lanka.” The message is loud and clear, and is clearly a slap in the face of the working people of the country, whose needs run counter to the excessive greed of extractive corporate freeloaders. Economic growth has to be understood in terms that are radically different from what we have been forced to think of it as, till now. For instance, instead of investment for high profits, and the business of buy and sell in the market, rechannel investment and labour into overall welfare. Even catch phrases like sustainable development have missed their mark. We need to think of the economy more holistically and see it as the sustainability of life, livelihood and the wellbeing of the planet.
The disaster has brought on an urgency for rethinking our policies. One of the areas where this is critical is education. There are two fundamental challenges facing education: Budget allocation and priorities. In an address at a gathering of the Chamber of Commerce, on 02 December, speaking on rebuilding efforts, the Prime Minister and Minister of Education Dr. Harini Amarasuriya restated her commitment to the budget that has been passed, a budget that has a meagre 2.4% of the GDP allocated for education. This allocation for education comes in a year that educational reforms are being rolled out, when heavy expenses will likely be incurred. In the aftermath of the disaster, this has become more urgent than ever.
Reforms in Education
The Government has announced a set of amendments to educational policy and implementation, with little warning and almost no consultation with the public, found in the document, Transforming General Education in Sri Lanka 2025 published by the Ministry of Education. Though hailed as transformative by the Prime Minister (https://www.news.lk/current-affairs/in-the-prevailing-situation-it-is-necessary-to-act-strategically-while-creating-the-proper-investments-ensuring-that-actions-are-discharged-on-proper-policies-pm), the policy is no more than a regurgitation of what is already there, made worse. There are a few welcome moves, like the importance placed on vocational training. Here, I want to raise three points relating to vital areas of the curriculum that are of concern: 1) streamlining at an early age; relatedly 2) prioritising and privileging what is seen as STEM education; and 3) introducing a credit-based modular education.
1. A study of the policy document will demonstrate very clearly that streamlining begins with Junior Secondary Education via a career interest test, that encourages students to pursue a particular stream in higher studies. Further Learning Modules at both “Junior Secondary Education” and “Senior Secondary Education Phase I,” entrench this tendency. Psychometric testing, that furthers this goal, as already written about in our column (https://kuppicollective.lk/psychometrics-and-the-curriculum-for-general-education/) points to the bizarre.
2. The kernel of the curriculum of the qualifying examination of Senior Secondary Education Phase I, has five mandatory subjects, including First Language, Math, and Science. There is no mandatory social science or humanities related subject. One can choose two subjects from a set of electives that has history and geography as separate subjects, but a Humanities/Social Science subject is not in the list of mandatory subjects. .
3. A credit-based, modular education: Even in universities, at the level of an advanced study of a discipline, many of us are struggling with module-based education. The credit system promotes a fragmented learning process, where, depth is sacrificed for quick learning, evaluated numerically, in credit values.
Units of learning, assessed, piece meal, are emphasised over fundamentals and the detailing of fundamentals. Introducing a module based curriculum in secondary education can have an adverse impact on developing the capacity of a student to learn a subject in a sustained manner at deeper levels.
Education wise, and pedagogically, we need to be concerned about rigidly compartmentalising science oriented, including technological subjects, separately from Humanities and Social Studies. This cleavage is what has led to the idea of calling science related subjects, STEM, automatically devaluing humanities and social sciences. Ironically, universities, today, have attempted, in some instances, to mix both streams in their curriculums, but with little success; for the overall paradigm of education has been less about educational goals and pedagogical imperatives, than about technocratic priorities, namely, compartmentalisation, fragmentation, and piecemeal consumerism. A holistic response to development needs to rethink such priorities, categorisations and specialisations. A social and sociological approach has to be built into all our educational and development programmes.
National Disasters and Rebuilding Community
In the aftermath of the disaster, the role of education has to be rethought radically. We need a curriculum that is not trapped in the dichotomy of STEM and Humanities, and be overly streamlined and fragmented. The introduction of climate change as a discipline, or attention to environmental destruction cannot be a STEM subject, a Social Science/Humanities subject or even a blend of the two. It is about the vision of an economic-cum-educational policy that sees the environment and the economy as a function of the welfare of the people. Educational reforms must be built on those fundamentals and not on real or imagined short term goals, promoted at the economic end by neo liberal policies and the profiteering capitalist class.
As I write this, the sky brightens with its first streaks of light, after days of incessant rain and gloom, bringing hope into our hearts, and some cheer into the hearts of those hundreds of thousands of massively affected people, anxiously waiting for a change in the weather every second of their lives. The sense of hope that allows us to forge ahead is collective and social. The response by Lankan communities, to the disaster, has been tremendously heartwarming, infusing hope into what still is a situation without hope for many. This spirit of collective endeavour holds the promise for what should be the foundation for recovery. People’s demands and needs should shape the re-envisioning of policy, particularly in the vital areas of education and economy.
(Sivamohan Sumathy was formerly attached to the Department of English, 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.
By Sivamohan Sumathy
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