Author name: Hasini Lecamwasam

Free Education, Social Welfare and the IMF Programme

Kuppi Talk / By

Sri Lanka’s seventeenth IMF agreement sealed last week may well prove to be the most devastating one of them all. The reason is that the agreement comes along with Sri Lanka having defaulted on its external debt for the first time in its history. The IMF amounts to being the arbiter of the debt restructuring process with Sri Lanka’s external creditors, which will provide considerable leverage for Sri Lanka to be held accountable to IMF conditionalities.

The Future is female?

Kuppi Talk / By

Statistics from the University Grants Commission (UGC) for 2020 show that out of 109,660 students that constituted the UGC intake for the year, 64.3 % were female. The preponderance of female students exists across disciplines with Engineering , Technology, and Computer Science being the only disciplines with larger male populations.

Privatisation of education and demonising of students of Lanka

Kuppi Talk / By

Sri Lanka is trapped in debt due to decades of corruption and short-sighted economic policies. To come out of the trap or, I would say, escape the moment, the government is seeking loans from the IMF, or anybody else who is willing to lend, no matter the conditions. To this end, under the IMF’s tutelage, the government is seeking to privatise education, aware that it will face the wrath of the people.

Quality assurance: The Great Scramble

Kuppi Talk / By

As Sri Lanka tumbles further into the abyss of economic misery, pressure on state universities to focus more on quality assurance (QA) increases, supposedly to justify the ‘strain’ they are placing on the public purse. QA purportedly seeks to improve the ‘quality’ of education that state universities deliver, by ensuring certain generalised standards are met and maintained, and extensive documentation is considered evidence of such.

Secularism, the Muslim body and the Sinhala-Buddhist polity

Kuppi Talk / By

This short piece is based on an anecdote of a striking memory that I have of a particular classroom at the Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya. Every time I walk past this particular classroom, it triggers the same memory and it has still not weathered. In this piece, I look back on this memory self-critically, in an attempt to understand my own self and analyze my thought process at the time of this incident.

The Year of 2022: The Democratic Turn

Kuppi Talk / By

The year 2022 draws to a close, a year that has been the hardest and the most glorious of the past 10 years. It has been the year of exploding gas cylinders, the fertiliser ban and women rising against micro finance. It has been the year of long queues. It is when Colombo erupted in protest as millions converged in its centres, and the President fled the country: the year of the Aragalaya and the year of the Poraattam and the Struggle. It is a year of victories, big and small.

Teaching feminism at SL universities

Kuppi Talk / By

Recently, I was in a discussion on Feminism with the members of the Post-Graduate Research (PGR) community at the University of Hull, in the United Kingdom. They were my colleagues, from the Middle-East, Asia and Europe, representing the natural and social sciences, but, apparently, did not possess any prior knowledge on feminism.