Sri Lankan engineers - 100 years and still strong

The Institution of Engineers of Sri Lanka held its 100th annual sessions at the BMICH recently where its President Jayantha Ranatunga in a presidential address stressed on the importance of innovative thinking for the engineers of today.

“Future engineers need to be extremely innovative and creative,” he said. He pointed out that unlike in the UK, in Sri Lanka the field of engineering did not have to compete with natural sciences to attract the best students in the maths stream towards engineering but noticed a preference for enrolling in the public sector where emphasis is for control and administration instead of innovation. He went on to state that innovation occurs in a diverse society. Speaking of the importance of allowing engineers to take risks and make mistakes in their innovations, Ranatunga said that many Sri Lankan innovations are based on intuition and common sense but went on to say that it was not enough as they were not results of focused research and development. Grassroot innovations are crude attempts to convey some clever idea. Ranatunga bemoaned the fact that the country has no mechanism to take them further up to a commercially successful stage.

Guests of honour for the occasion were President of the Institution of Civil Engineers UK Gordon Masterton, President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology UK Sir Robin Saxby and President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers UK Alec Osborne. In a key note address, Science & Technology Minister Professor Tissa Vitharana said that 29% of children under five years of age in Sri Lanka are malnourished. He noted that the reason for this is not the insufficient production of food but rather the lack of incomes to buy the food. “A million or more are unemployed, mainly young educated youth. It is a result of the free education system that we have that has also been our bane,” Vitharana said, pointing out the youth uprisings of the past and also the current problems in the north and east stemmed largely from the tremendous unemployment and frustration of local youth. Vitharana proposes meaningful economic development that will reach the village to overcome this problem.

There were also the distribution of certificates for professional engineers, fellowship certificates and also presentation of awards for the winners of the Junior Inventor of the Year Award which was won by R. M. Rajapakse of Ananda College for his ‘Efficient Funnel’.