Vijay Nagaraj: Contributions to public discourse in many guises
Vijay Nagaraj, who passed away in a tragic car accident in August, was someone I interacted with for around six years. We didn’t meet regularly, yet when we did, we carried on…
Economy
Unpaid Care Work: The Overlooked Barrier in Women’s Economic Empowerment
Photograph via video produced by Institute of Development Studies There is broad consensus that women’s empowerment underpins the success of the new 2030 Agenda for Development (also known as the Sustainable Development Goals)….
Roti and Rice: Examining Imbalances in Nutrition for Children in the Estate Sector
It’s 10:30 am at the Social Institute for the Development of Plantation Sector (SIDPS) pre-school on the Strathspey estate in Maskeliya. The children, most of them around five years old, queue up…
The Rights of Tea
The tea’s words explode, hot water turns into red and gold. Pekoe picked on Nuwareliya slopes. burnt in kilns, sorted then for the nose of a dapper merchant in a silk suit…
A Look Back with Fresh Hope
Photograph courtesy Introduction Many Sri Lankans trace the ethnic problem back to the movement for ‘Sinhala Only’ and the passage of the Official Language Act in 1956. In fact, the problemneeds to…
On religion, intolerance and economic prosperity
Photo by Dominic Sansoni Some moons back, in the course of a conversation with an overseas-based Sri Lankan academic who was then in Colombo on a short vacation, I was struck by…
As EU Parliament Considers Preferential Trade Status to Sri Lanka, Ensuring Human Rights Compliance Is Key
Picture courtesy What you probably don’t think about is the real cost of that shirt, or how a preferential trade scheme called GSP+ brings that shirt to European markets and implicates human…
Avoiding complacency on GSP Plus: The importance of long term economic reform
The recent announcement that Sri Lanka had successfully defeated a motion to deny the GSP Plus trade concession would boost the country’s export sector, which had been flagging over the last 18 months,…
After Sampur
It has been five months since the Sampur Coal power project has been terminated. Those who protested against the project celebrated their victory. Now the matter has been forgotten, and there is…
Forecast for 2017: Deshal de Mel
This is the third in a series of video interviews forecasting what 2017 will have in store across different sectors, including women’s rights, economics, and arts and culture. Deshal de Mel, senior economist from…
Three scenarios for Sri Lanka’s future: Lecture by Razeen Sally
An expected economic take-off has not happened two years into the change of government says Prof. Razeen Sally, chairman of the Institute of Policy studies in Sri Lanka. Delivering a public lecture…
Budget 2017: The good, bad and ugly
Mixed feelings prevail in the wake of Budget 2017 being presented in Parliament. Overall, the Budget was fairly holistic in coverage, being broadly linked to Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s statements to Parliament earlier…
Regaining Paradise with Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s victory is a beacon of hope to extremists of every stripe, from the Ku Klux Klan to Marine Le Pen, from Islamic extremists and Hindu nationalists to our very own…
INFOGRAPHIC: Paying the price for past extravagance
This week, it was announced that Sri Lanka would be paying as much as USD 170 million (Rs. 25 billion) to aircraft leasing company AerCap Holdings, in order to cancel the purchase of…
No Internet Please, We’re Sri Lankan!
That is what a retired professor of mass communications told me publicly at a university media conference four years ago. I was a bit taken aback as he had no clinical training…
