May 2026

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 Vijitha Yapa An Unlikely Recruit Dressed in a well-ironed white shirt — unusual for a journalist — the man standing in front of me to be interviewed was a scribe working for the Tamil newspaper Veerakesari. D.B.S. Jeyaraj was a friend of our Features Editor, Ajith Samaranayake, and had come for an interview to join The Island newspaper in 1981. I was a bit sceptical, as I soon found out that he had never worked for an English-language newspaper. But since Ajith was a good, responsible jour