By Garvin Karunaratne The IMF was the international organization by which the United Nations at its inception intended to organize and bring about development of the economies of the World .This did really happen till 1977 when under the Washington Consensus World Bank chief McNamara, and President Ronald Regan took over world development and altered […]

Garvin Karunaratne, former GA Matara It was a Saturday morning. Seated in the verandah of the Warakapola Rest House I was waiting for the arrival of the Hon Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Dudley Senanayake. It was my task every Saturday and Sunday to meet him and be with him the entire day, for two […]

Garvin Karunaratne Let us live in hope Let there be a new Programme To Create jobs- Earnings for people Alleviating their poverty Making everything that we import today. My mind rushes to the Matara of 1971 when I as Matara Disapathy Ran Ariyadasa, DeeRrOo created a Boatyard making seafaring boats And we also established an […]

Garvin Karunaratne On the Thirty First of Jan 2026 Bimba, Hiran and I, Siri at the wheel, We left Anuradhapura far behind the Anuradhapura where in the TwoSixties and ThreeSixties We worked there,myself in Agrarian and Bimba a teacher at the Central I laboured to implement the Paddy Lands Act, It was three of us […]

By Garvin Karunaratne Pliny( GaiusPlinius Secundus), an Army Commander of the Roman Army who battled for Rome in Germany in his records speak of living in Taprobane for some six months and also mentions of an ambassador to Rome from the island of Taprobane. He speaks of landing in Kudiramalai in Taprobane, hosted by the […]

by Garvin Karunaratne Is it not sad that the current Government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has not come up with a new Programme for development, to allay poverty. It is true that we have been assailed by Mother Nature- the Ditwah that devastated our country recently. However any problem has to be surmounted. My […]

by Garvin Karunaratne IN the Fifth Century we built Yodha Ela at a gradient of five inches in a mile. Today,we are begging for dollars from the IMF. Our leaders were fooled by the IMF and we that were never in Debt, got weaned to live on loans. Our leaders are urged to put an […]

Garvin Karunaratne It all happened in the Bangladesh Secretariat, three days after General Ershard took over the country in a bloodless coup on the 24 th of March 1982. The Minister for Youth Development was clamped in prison and the work of the Ministry was in jeopardy. The third in command, Air Vice Marshall Aminul […]

by Garvin Karunaratne Posted on November 12th, 2024   Re printed for favour of action E-Con-E-News 3-9 th November in Lanka Web writes: • ‘Garvin Karunaratne writes again today. I have read his Dahanayaka & red-onion affair several times in the Island. His telephone handling at the Marketing Department’s Tripoli HQ resembles Mountbatten’s war operations room.’” We […]

Garvin Karunaratne Agriculture luminary, Professor Buddhi Marambe has been quoted in Ceylon Today, to the effect that paddy cultivation is facing a serious situation as a consequence of the Ditwah Cyclone. The cyclone devastated 106,000 hectares from the extent cultivated in the Maha season. The chances are that it is only a small percentage of […]

Garvin Karunaratne Of the Administrative Service 1955-1973 Twenty Second Dec 2025 Leaving Royal Park in the shrill morning Siri at the wheel, Hiran and both of us, On our way to the holy shrine at Kataragama On the Mahinda Rajapaksa Highway, Thanks to Mahinda for making it. we passed by Culloden Estate Neboda where my dad, […]

By GARVIN KARUNARATNE Ph.D. Published 4 years ago on 2022/02/8 The editorial of The Island on Sri Lanka’s Independence Day says it all: The challenge before us is to retrace our steps, figure out where we took wrong turns, and forge ahead in the right direction, as many other nations have already done. Easier said than […]

by Garvin Karunaratne, GA Matara half a century ago Our country, Sri Lanka has had a long history of development programs to provide for low income and incomeless people. The best method of finding incomes for the low waged is by getting them on the ladder to attend to some task which helps them creating […]

by Garvin Karunaratne Posted on January 17th, 2024 Our monetary economists of today have decided that printing money is to be stopped till the end of the year. The new Central Bank Act of 2023 is said to forbid money printing. Some foremost economists and the Central Bank of Sri Lanka are of the opinion […]

by Garvin Karunaratne . Ph.D (Michigan State University) The recovery for the Ditwah Disaster will require billions. It is a bigger task than fixing all our irrigation tanks and financing the resettlement of people in the Dry Zone, a task well done in recent times. How is this task to be financed. Already foreign money […]

By Garvin Karunaratne Living in SriLanka for a few weeks I am stunned that we have no real development programmes that can convert the idle hours of our poor – the unemployed, into an income and in that process also produce some item that we import. This process will also really  create foreign exchange for […]

by Garvin Karunaratne. Courtesy The Island/03.05.2023 The Sri Lankan government is finding it hard to fulfil the regulations agreed upon with the IMF in the Houses of Parliament on April 28, 2023. However, there was no other option but to agree. According to Professor Vasanta Atukorale, the increases in taxes amount to a staggering 441%. […]

By Garvin Karunaratne, former G.A.Matara As a school boy at St Peter’s College I was always dragged by my father to mount and set up a public address system at one of the LSSP meetings. He owned Radio Works Bambalapitiya and held a contract with the LSSP to supply public address systems at election meetings […]

by Garvin Karunaratne The various countries in the World, both in the Developed and Under-developed areas are in utter chaos, with citizens moving en masse from the under developed countries to the developed world -North America and the European countries. One route is via North Africa and Italy to the European countries and Italy is […]

by Garvin Karunaratne, Ph.D. Michigan State University The most vulnerable today in our Motherland are the persons and families that live on casual incomes far lower than Rs. 100,000 a month, some who depend on any income that comes their way., with no regular income whatsoever. In the City of Colombo I am personally aware […]

by Garvin Karunaratne Let us harness the wind for power and stop spending dollars for oil By Garvin Karunaratne I enclose a write up by eesrilanka wordpress.com/2019/04/13/playing with history: on some of my writings. __________________________________________________________ C2. Buying Power from Multinationals Garvin Karunaratne recalls his experience of 18 years working in stations like Hambantota as well as in […]

by Garvin Karunaratne I enclose an earlier Paper of mine. Hope the Government of Premier Anura Kumara will read it. Though in my Nineties, if called upon  I will undertake to see that all the power we need comes from the Wind Power in our hills, all done within twelve months.  It will be a […]

by Garvin Karunaratne We have little say about restrictions being imposed on us. Somehow we have to stand on our feet. In the far past we did have programmes that tackled poverty and enabled people to produce what we need. However today no attempt is being made to help people to become entrepreneurs, to make […]

By Garvin Karunaratne President Trump is looking after the interests of the USA and mind you within months many industries will open up making what the USA did import. Once I owned a Roadtrek-Chevrolet campervan in the USA and clocked over 50,000 miles travel over hill and dale. It was a marvel, far better that […]

By Garvin Karunaratne, former GA Matara  It is reported that a number of leading countries including the USA and India want to wrest control of our graphite. I have read somewhere that our graphite is of superb quality- something like the best in the World.. Because we are buried in the quagmire of debt and […]

by Garvin Karunaratne E-Con-E-News 3-9 th November in Lanka Web writes: • ‘Garvin Karunaratne writes again today. I have read his Dahanayaka & red-onion affair several times in the Island. His telephone handling at the Marketing Department’s Tripoli HQ resembles Mountbatten’s war operations room.’” We did use phones in a remarkable way to move veg […]

Garvin Karunaratne former Government Agent, Matara (Posted on November 17th, 2013; reprinted for kind consideration  a decade later) A Spectacular Phenomenon Last week I went to Iceland, in search of the Northern Lights, a mysterious phenomenon – coloured shades of light in the sky taking various forms, at times even sequencing a dance.‚  Every tourist […]

by Garvin Karunaratne When we became independent in 1948, we- the colonies were the market for everything produced in the UK. With independence, we had to change to enable development, production in industry and agriculture and foremost to alleviate poverty. We had commenced Land Development, Irrigation, and Agriculture. To enable people to be trained, we […]

by Garvin Karunaratne Sri Lanka, a sovereign country that did not owe a penny to anyone in 1977 has built up a foreign debt by following the dictates of the International Monetary Fund since 1977. In September 2022 the foreign debt was at $ 47.7 billion and by September 2024 the foreign debt was stated […]

by Dr Garvin Karunaratne I enclose my earlier Paper,  posted in Lanka Web  two years ago(11/3/2022), re edited in the hope that its recommendations to build up our economy will be heard in the portals of our new saviour President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. This Paper contains a blue print for immediate action to build up […]