Sidhartha Thamby

By Sidhartha Thamby The Dividends to Reap from State Land According to the Land Commissioner General’s Department (eSlims, as at 7 February 2022), 123,141 land use permits have been issued against a total of 401,000 families in the province. The number eligible to receive permits in 2022 stood at 40,782, with 6,040 permits still unused.¹⁰ All permits ultimately flow through the Governor’s office for processing before titles are issued by the Director General of Lands in Colombo — a labour-in

By Sidhartha Thamby There is a particular cruelty in watching a party that once raged against the abuse of power quietly settle into practicing it. Sri Lanka has seen this before. What is new is that we are watching it happen to Provincial Council elections — a decade overdue — and to the constitutional architecture of devolution itself, piece by piece, coordinator by coordinator, committee by committee. We are watching the slow installation of party-aligned coordinators, the bypassing of elec

By Sidhartha Thamby Every society that has passed through large-scale political violence carries the obligation to reckon with it honestly. That Sri Lanka shares this condition with dozens of other countries is not a reason for complacency — it is a reminder that resolution is possible because others have achieved it, and that failure is not inevitable. More than seventeen years after the Sri Lankan military crushed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in a brutal final campaign, the country h