Affairs Of An Island & The World
By Asanga Abeyagoonasekera –May 26, 2016
Asanga Abeygoonasekera
A Forgotten national hero: remembering Ven. S.Mahinda
On the 15th of May sixty five years ago was the death of one of the great national hero’s of Sri Lanka Ven. S.Mahinda also known as Tibet S.Mahinda. Born in Gangtok, Sikkim state of India located in the Himalayan Mountains, this foreigner by nationality to Lanka dedicated his life to awaken the nationalistic sentiments to liberate the country from the British. His poetry generated sparks through our independence movement. Remembering individuals in our society is important not only the politicians who was behind the national struggle. A memorial lecture to remind us of S.Mahinda’s work particularly in the sphere of literature to our younger generation should have been conducted.
Regional Disaster management Center
The worst natural disaster after many years affected the island of Sri Lanka., The floods and related landslides killed more than 91persons with still more than 100 missing and 400,000 affected. The floods have caused more than $1.5 billion worth of damage. Many Sri Lankans locally and internationally combined strengths to assist generously toward the cause of flood aid to come out of this situation just like in 2004 Tsunami.
Photo courtesy Isuru Perera
Last November the first annual international disaster convention in Sri Lanka was held by MDF which this author attended and Chaired a session to share the successful Tsunami reconstruction work at fishery harbours corporation during his time. The first thing I noticed when entering the conference was many empty chairs, apparently many high level politicians and officials were invited but they couldn’t make it due to their busy schedules. The military was present with few interested participants. During my remarks commenting “It was Prime Minister who established the ministry of disaster management, he understood the importance of the subject back then. We need a national disaster management plan for all stakeholders to work together, public private partnership is essential and all of them need to sync or else they will work on their own silos. SAARC Regional disaster management center in Dhaka contribution is limited and I don’t think it’s operating. Sri Lanka is an ideal location a geo-strategic hub to setup a regional disaster management center.” With the increased regional natural disasters in the last several months in Nepal, Bangladesh, South India and now Sri Lanka the government should seriously consider setting up a state of the art fully equipped regional disaster management center that could predict accurately few days before the disaster.
