Sri Lanka’s Pioneering MP Monitoring Website Now Online

August 23, 2013 |

Sri Lanka’s Pioneering MP Monitoring Website (Manthri.lk) Now Online With Advanced Capabilities To Empower Sri Lankan Voters To Be Better Informed (in Sinhala, Tamil & English)

Sri Lanka’s very first website to enable voters to assess the performance of their elected representatives in the national legislature on objective criteria through state of the art technology and credible, reliable methodologies, was unveiled and launched this evening (Friday, August 23, 2013), in Committee Room D of the BMICH in Colombo.

The trilingual site (www.manthri.lk) is not politically affiliated and can be accessed and made use of in Sinhala, Tamil and English. The site involved work by reputed research organization Verite Research (www.veriteresearch.org), which provides strategic analysis and solutions to governments and private sector entities in Asia. They were partnered as initial contributors, by Saberion (Pvt) Ltd and National Endowment for Democracy.

Upto now, voters have been faced with difficulty in tracing, collating and evaluating the respective contributions of Members of Parliament (MPs) in the House. In fact, some MPs have not made any contribution at all to the discussion and debates that take place within the legislature. This problem had been highlighted in several studies conducted in the past. However, this is the first time that a solution of this nature has been made available to the public, enabling any user to have clearer insights and appreciation of how elected representatives in the Sri Lankan Parliament have engaged (or not engaged) critical issues of general or particular interest or relevance.

A user is able to search for MPs by district, political party, political coalition or topic. Parliamentarians can also be compared for rankings in several ways, which are based on objective and defensible criteria. The site also sets out an overall ranking as well as district wise ranking of Parliamentarians.Read More