English and IT

Sri Lanka, though a developing nation, reaches standards of health and literacy comparable with developed countries thanks to free healthcare and education. Several past irrigation projects have given us self sufficiency in essential food items and we actually export clothing to the rest of the world! Each one of our success stories, from the cricketing field to the battle field, can be traced back to initiatives that just made sure people had the resources to do what was expected of them.

While our market size and available natural resources place constraints on large scale manufacturing, we do have almost everything in place to provide services to the rest of the world at very competitive rates. I say almost everything because English literacy is still low outside the capital and that is the lingua franca of commerce, while IT skills are a pre-requisite for most high-skilled service offerings but access to computers is still restricted to the more affluent.

This is why the 'Year of English and IT' excites me; I'm not naive enough to believe that we'll be raking in the billions like Bangalore does today in a year or two, but time and again Sri Lankans have shown that we can achieve a lot with a little, so I'm as upbeat as Bill Gates is about where we're going with this initiative!