Mario Gomez, ICES, & IDRC commit Research Fraud In Sri Lanka
By Muttukrishna Sarvananthan –January 17, 2016
Dr. Muttukrishna Sarvananthan
In August 2013 I received a “Call for Proposals” (CfP) by the Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) programme of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada) through a global network I am member of. The GrOW programme is jointly funded by the Department for International Development (DfID), IDRC, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (California); the DfID contributing nearly seventy per cent of the total funding. However, IDRC is the implementing agency.
I was interested in bidding for this research and policy advocacy grant because I have been always concerned about ethnic, gender, and regional inequalities in Sri Lanka and have a track record of peer-reviewed academic publications to demonstrate that concern. Besides, I had completed a study for the CARE International (Sri Lanka) in early 2013 on the impact of post-civil war economic growth on women in the former conflict-affected Eastern and Northern Provinces of Sri Lanka and wished to upscale that study.
As the Point Pedro Institute of Development (PPID) does not have the administrative capacity to implement both the research and policy advocacy components of this grant, I approached the Executive Director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo, Mario Gomez, to find out whether ICES would like to collaborate with PPID and jointly submit a proposal to the IDRC. The choice of ICES for collaboration was mainly because it has a track record of research and advocacy on discrimination against women and on the cause of gender equality in Sri Lanka, especially until 2006 when it was headed by the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. Besides, I have worked at the ICES from January 2001 to December 2003 and subsequently collaborated with the ICES on a post-tsunami research study covering the Eastern, Northern, and Southern Provinces funded by the UNICEF (Sri Lanka office) during 2005-2006.
The ICES agreed to collaborate with PPID and make a joint submission to the CfP by the GrOW programme of the IDRC. The deadline for the first round of application was late-October 2013. The proposal was prepared by an ICES staff in collaboration with two other temporary staff of the ICES with significant input from me on behalf of the PPID. In this first round of the proposal Chulani Kodikara of the ICES was proposed to be the Principal Investigator (PI) and Muttukrishna Sarvananthan of the PPID was to be the Co-Investigator (CI) and no other personnel were proposed. Our joint proposal was short-listed in January 2014 and ICES-PPID was asked to submit a full proposal (including the budget) by late March 2014. The first round of application was reviewed by three external reviewers appointed by the IDRC and we received the comments by the three external reviewers in order to address the concerns raised by the reviewers in our full proposal.
