I’ll call him Kasendra. He is sitting next to me in a packed, sweaty room at the Kathmandu Airport, in one of those uncomfortable iron seats mounted on metal bars. He is clutching a transparent light blue plastic folio and reading the contents within, without taking the documents out. The documents are from a manpower agency in Kathmandu and […]
Last year was an annus horribilis for 52-year-old Newton Gunathileka. A paddy smallholder from Sri Lanka’s north-western Puttalam District, 2017 saw Gunathileka abandon his two acres of paddy for the first time in over three-and-a-half decades, leaving his family almost destitute. The father of two had suffered two straight harvest losses and was over 1,300 […]
When Siri Hettige, a sociology professor at Colombo University, conducts surveys of young people across Sri Lanka, he never fails to ask one key question: Does anybody want to become a farmer? ‘No’ has been the overwhelmingly emphatic answer, he said. That is one indicator of the growing poverty plaguing many farmers in Sri Lanka, […]
Scorched by a 10-month drought that has killed crops and reduced residents to buying trucked-in water, Adigama’s young people are voting with their feet. At least 150 youth have left this agricultural village 170 km northwest of Sri Lanka’s capital since the drought began, looking for jobs in the country’s cities, or overseas, village officials […]
When Nathkulasinham Nesemalhar took a flight from Colombo to Muscat in March she believed the boarding pass she clutched in her hand was her golden ticket to a better life after decades of war where she lost everything, including her husband. The 54-year-old widow from Sri Lanka’s former war zone had been promised work as […]