Minister of Education Mr. Dullas Alahapperuma recently expressed some observations on the infrastructural capacity in the schools of Sri Lanka and a general overview on the education sector in Sri Lanka.
“In this country, only 23% of the households have some kind of a computer at home, only 82% have a television and only 8% have more than one TV. Let alone all these, there’re children who don’t have access to a radio. This issue affects mostly the children in the North and in the up country. We need to give the technology to our children, that’s no doubt, but that’s the last step. Before all that, we need to understand that there are schools which do not have electricity or basic internet facilities. There’re 582 schools in this country which have no water facilities at all. In such a time, it should be our motive to develop digital infrastructure as well in these schools”, he said.
Speaking further on the field of Education in Sri Lanka, the Minister went onto say that closer to 3% of the Gross Domestic Production (GDP) has been allocated for education sector alone, despite there is a popular slogan to allocate 6% of the GDP for education. He also noted that, however, a large portion of such allocation is practically not used on the ground level. “If this 3% of GDP is put into full use and used from the ground level, I’m sure that is more than enough to achieve our targets”, he noted.