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India to help upgrade Sri Lanka education infrastructure

COLOMBO: India and Sri Lanka are to meet in Bangalore before June to chalk out an action plan to upgrade the technical and managerial education sector infrastructure in the island nation to meet a serious shortage of manpower and boost economic growth.

This agreement was arrived at here on Monday at an interactive session between the Indian delegation led by Union Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh and his Sri Lanka counterpart, Sarath Amunugama.

Mr. Ramesh is on a three-day official visit with a high level delegation of Indian entrepreneurs and business executives to explore possibilities of collaboration in textiles, IT and education.

One of the main points that emerged in the course of the 90-minute interactive session was that the educational infrastructure of Sri Lanka is not equipped to cater for the demand. While an estimated 1.2 lakh students qualify 12 examinations every year, the universities in Sri Lanka have only 11,500 seats to offer.

Under the statute of Sri Lanka, private universities are not allowed to be set up and due to paucity of funds the government is not in a position to expand the existing infrastructure for higher education.

The Sri Lanka Minister attributed the gap in supply and demand in the education sector to the ‘socialist’ policies adopted by successive Governments.

However, at the same time Dr. Amunugama said there should be no difficulty in establishing institutes offering technical and managerial courses with the help of foreign organisations including from India.

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