This course is designed to focus on a range of issues that relate to the three most formidable challenges of contemporary Sri Lanka : poverty, environmental degradation and political instability. The course is expected to serve as a forum for discussing, from geographical perspectives, the achievements and failures of Sri Lanka 's efforts at developmenti.e., improving the quality of life, ecological costs and the sustainability of such efforts, and the intractability of solutions to inter-group conflict.
Course content: Sri Lanka as a developing country; The phenomenon of poverty in Sri Lanka; Demographic transformations; Paradigms of development effort; Agrarian change and agricultural development; Changing trends of plantation agriculture; Industrial development; The energy crisis; and Inter-group conflict.