Authorities still unable to restore disrupted passport supply

Text and pic By Shamindra Ferdinando

The National People’s Power (NPP) government hasn’t been able to normalize the issuance of new passports and renewal of existing passports yet, while tens of thousands of desperately poor Lankans are trying to go abroad to earn a living, to keep their home fires burning, on top of well over a million of their fellow countrymen/women who are already doing so, without being a burden to anyone. The situation at the passport office is unlikely to be restored anytime soon.

The latest Foreign Employment Bureau data shows that a total of 312,836 Sri Lankans left the country for overseas jobs last year. Among them 185,162 were male workers, while 127,674 were female, who mainly work as housemaids.

In spite of the change of rulers. following the presidential election, the whole process remains thoroughly disorganized for want of uninterrupted supply of new passports.

For those seeking to obtain a new passport, at a cost of Rs. 10,000, will have to wait patiently for months. It costs twice that amount to obtain a PP through the Immigration and Emigration Department’s one day service. For those who are desperately poor, even Rs 10,000 is obviously astronomically high. The Department is unable to indicate when its normal service can be fully restored.

Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath recently acknowledged that the government is yet to choose a new supplier of passports. On the part of the troubled Immigration and Emigration Department, there is absolutely no hesitation in acknowledging the continuing crisis created by the previous regime, led by Wickremesinghe.

The previous dispensation failed to meet the growing requirement for passports, while at the same time it rushed headlong to finalise a controversial agreement for the issuance of online visas with the involvement of foreign entities at tremendous cost. That agreement came into operation on 07 May, 2024.

In terms of the hotly disputed agreement, inked between the Immigration and Emigration Department and a foreign consortium – GBS Technology Services & IVS Global-FZCO and its technical partner VF Worldwide Holdings Ltd., the latter received exclusive rights to process online visa applications.

Who facilitated the deal between the Dubai-headquartered consortium and the government of Sri Lanka? In June 2023, the Public Security Ministry received, what some called, unsolicited proposal though the writer believes that move had been in line with a conspiracy to terminate the existing agreement with state-owned enterprise Mobitel and the Immigration and Emigration Department. That proposal, titled ‘Comprehensive Proposal on E-Visa, Consular Services, Visa Services, Biometric Services and Tourism Promotion,’ was meant to pave the way for the new agreement. The Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa government was in a hurry to conclude the agreement.

But the original proposal had been made in March 2022 before a violent protest campaign that targeted the ouster of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa got underway on 31 March, 2022, with their first demonstration outside his private residence at Mirihana. The same proposal was made to the Foreign Ministry, in October 2022, a couple of months after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced out of office by violent protesters, who even stormed the official residence of the President, where he had taken up residence after he had to flee from his private home in March. The Dubai-based company then took up its proposal with the Public Security Ministry, in June 2023, and, following Cabinet authorization, the two parties finalized the agreement on 31 December, 2023.

The utterly corrupt decision that had been made without competitive bidding meant to ensure the best for the country, resulted in a shocking increase in visa fees – from the previously affordable $ 1 fee charged by Mobitel to a staggering $ 25 per visa. The issue exploded in the run-up to the presidential election. In fact, it was a major issue on the election platform. No less a person than NPP presidential candidate Anura Kumara Disanayake (AKD) dealt with the issue quite often as the Opposition fiercely attacked the Wickremesinghe administration over what was widely called ‘online visa scam.’

The absence of long queues doesn’t mean the situation is better. Unless the government takes remedial measures promptly, the situation is going to deteriorate, regardless of half-baked solutions provided by the government.

Under the leadership of Dr. Harsha de Silva, the Committee on Public Finance (CoPF) inquired into the matter. No holds barred investigation revealed that the previous visa service provider Mobitel had submitted several proposals to upgrade the system, all at a much lower cost – just $ 1 per visa, though the government selected the foreign consortium.

The question remained as to why the government ignored Mobitel’s offer and ended up paying so much more for a less secure system?

Widespread accusations pertained to the online visa scam and disruption of the new passport supply line, too, contributed to the unprecedented NPP victories at the presidential and parliamentary elections. The voting public realized the gravity of the situation as the Supreme Court stepped in and quashed the sordid deal in August 2024, just weeks before the presidential election.

The SC suspended the controversial visa scheme. The court ordered the immediate restoration of the low cost and efficient previous system run by Mobitel. The online visa scam dealt a crushing blow to Wickremesinghe’s presidential election bid.

A cumbersome process

The writer was among those present on the second floor of the Department of Immigration and Emigration at Suhurupaya, Sri Subhuthipura Road, Battaramulla on the morning of 08 January, 2025, when an official declared that those who wanted to obtain new passports sooner may comeback exactly in one month after handing over their applications, to make representations to a special committee tasked with expediting the process. That message was repeated on several occasions.

In the absence of a steady supply of new passports, the powers that be adopted a system meant to delay the entire process, much to the disappointment of the public. Regardless of the change of the government, the disgraceful system continues. Let me explain how hapless people are being harassed by an utterly corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy.

Having submitted photographs online to the Immigration and Emigration Department on 20 November, 2024 (the day before the parliamentary election), the writer was able to secure an appointment on 08 January, 2025, just to hand over the applications – 50 days from the day the writer submitted photographs via a studio as instructed by the Department.

After the handing over of an application, one has to wait for a month to make representations to the Department. But, there is no guarantee that the Immigration and Emigration committee can be convinced. Those who can afford may obtain a new passport through the ‘one-day service’ but at a very much higher cost. Those who boast of friendly and cost-effective government services owed the public an explanation as to why people are deprived of an opportunity to obtain a passport within a reasonable period of time.

It would be pertinent to mention that it could take as many as 80 days to meet the Immigration and Emigration committee from the day one submitted photographs online.

Advice offered by Immigration and Emigration official on the second floor underscored that there is no time-frame for issuance of passports for those depending on the normal service. The process can take a couple of months and the situation may take a turn for the worse if the government fails to reach agreement on a suitable supplier of passports.

The crisis in the Immigration and Emigration Department exposed the previous Cabinet-of-Ministers, headed by President Ranil Wickremesinghe. The decision-making process in respect of the issuance of online visa and shortage of new passports failed on the part of the Cabinet to ensure transparency in such a vital matter.

The Controller General of Immigration and Emigration, Harsha Illukpitiya, had to pay a huge price for playing ball with the then government. The SC, on 25 September, 2024, remanded Illukpitiya, on contempt of court charges for failing to implement the interim order and other orders in respect of the implementation of the electronic visa process. The SC three-judge bench, consisting of Justices Preethi Padman Surasena, Kumuduni Wickremasinghe, and Achala Wengappuli fixed the matter for inquiry on 22 January, 2025 (next Wednesday).

The SC dismissed Illukpitiya’s defence that his failure in this regard hadn’t been deliberate and the delay was due to technical issues. The whole issue should be examined taking into consideration the then President Ranil Wickremnesinghe’s efforts to put off the presidential election the way he made the Local Government polls disappear and the contemptible bid to retain Deshabandu Tennakoon’s services as the Inspector General of Police. The President’s move on the IGP was contrary to the SC decision pertaining to the controversial cop. But, Wickremesinghe until the very last moment sought to consolidate his hold through questionable means.

The UNP leader, for some unexplainable reason, went along with Public Security Minister Tiran Alles in the much discussed online visa matter and the IGP’s issue. The government should have realized the crisis it was heading for when the SC, on 02 August, 2024, issued an interim order suspending the contract given to a private consortium.

The SC issued this order after considering Fundamental Rights (FR) petitions filed by the then MPs M.A. Sumanthiran (ITAK), Rauff Hakeem (SJB), Patali Champika Ranawaka (SJB) and a few others. There were altogether eight petitioners.

During proceedings, on 25 September, 2024, President’s Counsel Sumanthiran asked the SC to remand Illukpitiya pending the conclusion of the cases. In a way, the SC brought the government down to its knees.

On a SC directive, the NPP government appointed the Additional Secretary of Public Security Ministry, B.M.D. Nilusha Balasuriya, as the Acting Controller General of Immigration and Emigration.

SC shows the way

Sumanthiran failed to get elected at the last general election, while United Republican Front leader Patali Champika Ranawaka skipped the election over differences with the SJB leadership. Hakeem got re-elected again on the SJB ticket. The SJB MPs joining ITAK heavyweight proved that political parties could work together to fight corruption at the highest level. Among the respondents were the then Minister of Public Security Tiran Alles, the Controller General of Immigration Illukpitiya, the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority, GBS Technology Services & IVS Global- FZCO, VFS VF Worldwide Holdings LTD, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Attorney General.

The successful action must encourage other lawmakers to move relevant courts if the government resorted to corrupt practices. Illukpitiya’s fate is nothing but an unprecedented warning to all those carrying out illegal orders, that they may face catastrophic consequences.

Following the SC order, Sumanthiran, Ranawaka and Hakeem addressed the media. Ranawaka declared: “We filed a case against the e-visa fraud. The Supreme Court, after examining the complaint, ordered the return to the old ETA (Electronic Travel Authorization) system until the case was resolved. However, the Controller General Illukpitiya failed to implement the order due to the influence of the former Minister and President, who acted in defiance of the law.

Ranawaka alleged that the former Public Security Minister’s overwhelming ego is the primary cause for this. “The ruling also serves as a lesson for public sector officials about blindly following politicians’ demands.”

The SC order demonstrated that the Cabinet of Ministers can be challenged, successfully. Let me remind you of the disclosure that former Cabinet colleagues of disgraced Health Minister Keheliya Rambukwella told police they approved his Cabinet proposal that paved the way for the procurement of substandard human immunoglobulin vials amid a shortage of medicines in the country because they trusted him.

Over a dozen ex-Ministers claimed that they wouldn’t have backed Rambukwella’s Cabinet proposal if they knew the Health Minister was making false claims. The police questioned them pertaining to the SC order in respect of that particular investigation.

The crux of the matter is whether members of the Cabinet, who backed the online visa fraud, can be subjected to CID investigations.

Alles is on record as having said that the Parliament unanimously approved the changes to the visa processes, including the introduction of several new visa categories, while the involvement of the foreign consortium in managing online and on-arrival visas was referred to the Cabinet of Ministers on two occasions and got its sanction.

Citizens’ actions

The massive fraud perpetrated by the government may have gone unnoticed if not for video clips of an irate passenger, later identified as Sandaru Kumarasinghe, lambasting the government for handing over the responsibilities to a foreign consortium.

At the behest of the government, the Katunayaka police recorded Kumarasinghe’s statement who fiercely criticized the foreign consortium for denying an online visa to his wife, a foreign citizen.

The Opposition capitalized on the angry public sentiment caused by Kuamarsinghe who questioned the Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa government’s right to outsource such vital responsibilities to a foreign consortium at the expense of local competitors. The incident at the BIA in late April or early May, 2024, drew public attention.

Kumarasinghe’s declaration of Indian involvement in the operation, and subsequent statements, compelled the Indian High Commission in Colombo to issue the following statement: “We have seen reports and comments, including in social media, regarding Indian companies taking over visa issuance at Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA), Colombo. The companies referred to in these reports are not India-based or Indian and are headquartered elsewhere. Any reference to India in this context is unwarranted.”

The report of the Committee on Public Finance on the visa matter can be the basis of NPP government investigation. The circumstances under which Mobitel that had been providing services, since 2012, was discarded in spite of submitting proposals for system improvements in July and November 2020 (revised proposal) and in August 2023. The Immigration and Emigration Department unceremoniously rejected Mobitel’s strong stand that it had the required technological capacity. The powers that be had been determined to abolish their agreement with Mobitel despite it being a responsible state entity, at any cost. Who benefited from the deal with the Dubai-based company?

In the absence of proper mechanism to evaluate and supervise such major proposals, influential persons manipulated the process at will. There can’t be a better example than the Dubai-based company conveniently leaving out USD 200 mn investment earlier promised to make available for necessary technical equipment, software, and knowledge for system integration with the Immigration and Emigration Department.

Perhaps the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery and Corruption (CIABOC), too, should look into this matter. The CoPF investigation revealed how the government can be manipulated with catastrophic consequences.

By Lynn Ockersz

Vicious tongues of fire,

Are laying the land waste,

Reducing to smoking ruins,

Everything almost in their way,

Be they larger-than-life celebrities,

Glitzy palaces and newsy businesses,

And even the humble of the earth,

Eking out a painful existence,

They’re all fair game for these fires,

Which were let loose from the day,

The most intelligent animal,

Managed to find His voice,

And shaped it into a sword,

With a devastating double-edge.

The issue of academic freedom is back in the conversation circuit in Sri Lanka, particularly on social media. And as usual in circumambience involving academic freedom, it has come up for all the wrong reasons. As one would expect, the new government has also been dragged into the controversy. The center of the storm is the action taken by the Acting Vice Chancellor of the University of Peradeniya to cancel a regular extra-curricular lecture at the university titled, “How to Fight Against the IMF Austerity Programme.” It was to be held on 2nd of January 2025 by the Political Science Students’ Association in collaboration with the International Youth and Students for Social Equality operating in the country via the Socialist Equality Party, the latter two being marginal political entities in the country.

Disrupting a lecture for whatever reason is a bad practice and precedent, particularly in a university, which by definition is expected to be a ‘universal’ space when it comes to ideas and thinking. The International Monetary Fund or the IMF has been the subject of innumerable global discussions ever since it was established in 1944 at Bretton Woods. The IMF’s rightwing approach to politics and callous disregard for human suffering in advancing its programmes have been the main reasons for inviting controversy globally. But in the present world, it has become ‘a necessary evil’ until such time it can be replaced by more humane organisations to carry out the same tasks.

Be that as it may, the lecture organised by the Political Science Students’ Association is an ordinary lecture of the kind often organised by student bodies across universities. Also, it very much sounds like the usual rhetoric against the IMF the world over. Given the political associations of the collaborators, it most likely would have also been a rhetorical affair on par with their general established slogans on the issue. That is to say, there was nothing unusual, unexpected or exceptional about the organization of the event, and no compelling concerns linked to national security or maintenance of law and order were evident that necessitated its cancellation.

When a university lecture is cancelled by a directive from above, it always leaves a bad taste in the mouth. This is particularly so when it is a blatant act of curbing academic freedom from within the establishment. Unfortunately, University of Peradeniya is not the first to embrace this practice in our country; neither would it be the last. I hope there would be consistent and insistent conversations within the university about what happened unless what Prof. Romila Thapar, the former Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi says about such situations have come to dictate the nature of the academic environment at University of Peradeniya too: “It is not that we are bereft of people who can think autonomously and ask relevant questions. But frequently, where there should be voices, there is silence.” Closer to home, Prof Savitri Goonasekere, a former alumna of the University of Peradeniya and a former Vice Chancellor at University of Colombo calls this the “studied silence of the university community.” The outcomes of these conversations or lack thereof remains to be seen.

The lecture had the approval of the Head of the Department of Political Science. Notwithstanding, the senior treasurer of the Political Science Students’ Association, who is a faculty member, had informed the association that he had received a message from the Acting Vice Chancellor channeled through the Dean, Faculty of Arts and the Head of the Department of Political Science requesting that the topic of the lecture be revised and recirculated. Alternatively, if the suggested change was not made, the lecture would be cancelled. According to information circulating on social media, the objective of the university administrators was to ensure the lecture did not question government policies. This itself is a curious position. President Dissanayake’s stance on the IMF is well-known, if one takes a moment to listen to many videos of his speeches prior to the election. Merely because the government has begun to work with the IMF as a matter of necessity, it would be misplaced to assume the IMF has become the government’s darlings in the donor universe.

This opens several issues. It compromises the authority and independence university departments must have to organise lectures and academic events as they deem fit. If the Head of the Department of Political Science had given permission for the talk to proceed, the Acting Vice Chancellor or the Dean should not have had any issues with it. But now, those two officials have not only intervened, effectively challenging the university’s innate academic freedom, but by channeling the cancellation order through the Head of the Department of Political Science, who had already approved it, has undermined his position, command and professional dignity. It is sad that the latter did not stand his ground, but what is even more regrettable is that it is such compromising that often allows academic ‘un’freedom to take root in academia.

The pressure from the university’s senior management to cancel a talk organised by a group of undergraduates because it may anger the powers that be, speaks volumes about the way in which many of these senior dons in contemporary times think and seek to operate. It is not their responsibility to make governments happy. In fact, it is their moral obligation to ensure that the space for fresh and innovative thought of their university remains intact, open and vibrant rather than turning it into an intellectual wasteland. But this is precisely how academic freedom is curtailed in countries like ours and elsewhere too. Often, senior administrators go out of the way, to find ways to perceivably make a regime happy and protect their own positions in turn. This is partially due to the extreme politicisation and parochialisation of universities — from the presidential appointment of Vice Chancellors downwards, but also from the relative loss of leadership qualities in universities in general.

Part of the discourse on the present incident suggests that there were calls from the government’s Education Ministry to find out what the lecture was about and to bring pressure upon the university to ensure its cancellation. But the Education Minister and Prime Minister, Harini Amarasuriya has gone on record in issuing a statement saying, “Universities must remain places where diverse opinions, including critiques of government policies, can be freely expressed and discussed without fear of suppression. Nevertheless, we express concern about any action that undermines democratic expression and open dialogue within academic spaces.” It is commendable that she intervened as she did. Taking this incident as a point of departure, the Ministry of Education and its agencies such as the UGC need to urgently intervene as a matter of policy to ensure this callous disregard for academic freedom coming from within academia does not become the norm under the new dispensation too, and destroys any possibility of debate and discussion in universities, thereby stunting the already mediocre or perhaps even non-existent creative thought processes and analytical skills of our youth.

It seems what has happened is that senior university administrators were overly keen to find ways to make their allegiance to the regime known. This trend is not limited to Sri Lanka. In different universities across South Asia in recent times, it has become evident that academic bureaucrats try to work overtime to show their fidelity towards the government, even if the government has not made specific demands. Some university of Peradeniya insiders say that the lecture was canceled due to lapses in the approval process. If this was the case, there are numerous internal administrative processes that could have been used to rectify the matter rather than taking the drastic action of canceling a lecture.

Whatever the exact circumstances surrounding the case might be, this needless cancellation of a talk has certainly achieved two things: First, university of Peradeniya has established itself as the newest centre for academic ‘un’freedom in the country despite having been known historically as an institution from where critical and creative ideas once emerged. Second, it has also ensured that the two hitherto irrelevant political organisations — International Youth and Students for Social Equality and Socialist Equality Part — which were associated with the event have been elevated from relative oblivion to the status of heroes and protectors of academic freedom.

Let me conclude with the famous words of Edward Said I have referred to many times before: “Alas, political conformity rather than intellectual excellence was often made to serve as a criterion for promotion and appointment, with the general result that timidity, a studious lack of imagination, and careful conservatism came to rule intellectual practice.” I earnestly look forward to the day I won’t see the need to quote Said on academic freedom, but I am beginning to believe it would be a wait in vain.