I know more than 1 person including myself who are willing to give up greener pastures to serve Sri Lanka.

Muditha

If you look at the LMD magazine for May 2010 under the title captioned ” Tourism’s regenration” Hiran Coorey CEO of Jetwing Group says ” I believe that professionals who left in search of grneer pastures will not return unless they lose their jobs, apart from those who went to the Middle East.”

You are also correct when you say “you can live like a second class citizen in your own country.” It is a state of mind.

First of all I don’t agree with anyone discouraging people to come back (although my mother discouraged me from coming back once).

Please don’t take this as whining. It was my idea to create a dialogue. I am someone who wants to pay back my dues to the country. I agree there are only a few of us. Also I do whatever I could do on my own time. So take a moment before judging me. I also don’t agree with the second class citizen comment. That is a state of mind. You can live like that in your own country too.

Lot’s of people who has come back had done so after working overseas for a considerable number of years. After they established themselves and/or created political contacts. Most of them already had some contacts. There might be a few who started with nothing. It is a little skewed Gaussian distribution.

My original thought was to point out that we are missing out on developing basic science research in SL. This is why I brought India as an example. I don’t want to go through a list of complaints but look around.

I don’t want to place all the blame on the government but we are creating an environment in Sri Lanka, where a basic degree is not necessary to do most of the jobs which are being created. We spend a lot of money on education and higher education. We make our people work in jobs where they are overqualified, underpaid and under-appreciated.

Simple things like finding methods to eliminate dengue carrying mosquito, evaluating environmental impact of war, etc. Some agency government or private should start funding simple projects. Government could encourage such things.

We can make it work for everyone not just for the wealthy and the well connected (to steal from Mr. Obama).

One can die unloved and alone in Sri Lanka as well. So many of our youth have done so in the past 30 odd years of war in Sri Lanka on both sides including the JVP insurrections of 1971 and 1989/1990.

Britain is not an alien country. She ruled us from 1815-1948 and now so many Sri Lankans have made it their home.

I live and work in Sri Lanka before that I was a student in the UK. All my Sri lankan medical friends who were at University with me abroad now work for the NHS. Their University fees were paid for by their parents. They are happy there and I do not think anyone of them want to come back here right now. The war is over but they do not see a future for their children in Sri Lanka. As I said in my earlier post there are many reasons why Sri Lankans do not want to come back and work in the country of their birth especially the ones with families.
Doctors anywhere in the world work hard including Sri Lanka. Doctors in Sri Lanka also work very long hours to earn good money. In the UK they can earn more by putting in the same amount of long hours.
Second class citizen is a state of mind. I was never treated or felt a second class citizen in the UK.

I do live in Sri Lanka and have worked in this country for the past 15 years. I was a University student in the UK before that and all my medical friends who were at University with me from Sri Lanka are now working for the NHS. They never came back to Sri Lanka. Their families paid for their studies while at University and they were never a part of the Sri Lankan University system.

Anyway, the problem is that most academics who leave our shores do not end up as top researchers at Harvard or CERN. Many of them remain as junior faculty (even into their senior years) due to a different command of English and poor communication skills. This is not just hearsay but something I witnessed living in the USA for 15 years and visiting college campuses of varying degrees of fame, with Sri lankan faculty members in various disciplines.

The reality is there are over 4000 universities in the States, and I honestly believe the majority of them are crap. Work just dumbed down to suit the masses of folks who attend but are not interested in learning, classes taught by teaching assistants, and rampant grade inflation (I know of cases where students got A’s after missing exams that accounted for 20% of their grades – how is this possible)?

For all their crying about how the Sri Lankan system sucks, those who are now decrying their country abroad are mostly the same people who did not want to think outside the box, left work at 4.30 every day, took as much leave as possible, and did only what they were told. This is the same reason they imagine they enjoy life abroad (although inexplicably having to work much longer hours), since the SYSTEM itself has already been set up by someone else, and all they need to do is keep oiling it. Niranjan, the Sri Lankan doctors in the NHS are not loved because of their “work ethic,” but because they are willing to pimp themselves to do 36 hour shifts for not much more money in real terms than they got in SL, after having milked the Lankan system for all it was worth, for free, and then turned their backs on trying to develop the medical profession in the country, showing us that all they really care about is money.

The problem with the Sri Lankan mindset, be it academia or the public sector in general, is that nobody seems to have a collective goal, instead all having some individual notion of utopia, yet doing nothing to try and persuade others to help them achieve it.

Because if these people claim to have worked so HARD to change things in SL, then why the hell haven’t we heard about it? We have an entire section of the media devoted to pointing out the slightest flaws in the government or the system, but we never hear about any academic or doctor trying to battle the system. All this so called “challenge” they’re doing is all in their minds, just another excuse to get a speedy visa out of here.

Lets stop this constant whining, and excuses for why we must fail, and get on with the task at hand. Because there are no more terrorists to blame, no more war to blame, nothing to blame corrupt and idiotic politicians in power. If you want to change that, then now is the time for you to do it. Let those people who are living it up abroad do whatever they want, it is time for the future generations to take over and fix the problems the previous generations either left us, or ran away without fixing.

Currently the state higher education sector is a behemoth of a bureaucracy that encourages mediocrity, dullness and intolerance. The system is populated by people who are extremely insecure in their academic capability and who are threatened by anyone who is more capable then they are or is willing to work beyond the call of duty.

In my humble opinion, the most effective, pain free and cheap reform would be to put an end to the stifling centralization of the higher education bureaucracy and give greater freedom to universities to utilize their resources in a manner they see fit and giving the power to promote or hire, promote or dismiss lecturers and students.

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/SOUTHASIAEXT/Resources/Publications/TOLreportfinal.pdf