Grade One admissions requirements revised

Admitting children to schools is a major issue in Sri Lanka as you all know.

Some of you may even know about the difficulties your parents would have gone through to admit you to the best schools possible. This is an issue which crops up every year.

Parents are required to fulfil many criteria and provide various details and documents when applying for Grade One admissions.

One such document was an extraction of the voters list. For the 2009 Grade One admissions, the Ministry of Education has done away with the provision of this list at the point of making the applications.

Parents will be required to provide only the duration of permanent residency in the application which will be sent to the principals of the respective schools.

However, applicants will have to produce the extraction of the voters list relevant to the mentioned duration when they present themselves for the interviews.

This decision has been taken by the Ministry after considering the inconvenience faced by parents as well as Elections Commission staff when a large number of parents turn up for copies of voters lists at the same time.

The Ministry has also extended the closing date for the 2009 Grade One admissions to July 11.

Tackling population issues

The growing population issue has been described as a ticking time bomb. Why is it so? Because the world population keeps growing so fast that it’s assumed that humans will soon run out of the resources that are needed to sustain themselves.

Did you know that there were 6,704,845,726 human beings on Earth as at June 21, 2008? This may astonish you, but it is true! And the population keeps growing although the growth rate has halved since it peaked at 2.2 per cent per year in 1963. However, the growth rate has remained high in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

By the year 2000, there were 10 times the population there was 300 years ago. According to the US Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook for 2007, the world population increased by 211,090 every day. The total population is expected to exceed nine billion in 2042.

What is even more worrying is that 60 per cent of this global population - 3.8 billion - is based in Asia (China - 20 per cent and India - 17 per cent).

The Asian region is followed by Africa with an 840 million population (12 per cent), Europe with 710 million (11 per cent), North America with 514 million (eight per cent), South America with 371 million (5.3 per cent) and Australia with 21 million.

The last census conducted in Sri Lanka in 2001 put the local population around 19 million. However, the current population stands closer to 20 million and is expected to reach 21.5 million in 2015.

It is to focus on and increase awareness about this explosive problem that World Population Day is organised by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on July 11 every year.

This year’s event will take place under the theme ‘Plan Your Future: Plan Your Family’. It would reaffirm the right of people to plan their families and encourage activities, events and information that will help reach this goal.

The event was inaugurated by the UNFPA in 1988 to mark July 11, 1987, when the global population reached five billion.

The day focuses attention on the urgency and importance of population issues, particularly in the context of overall development plans and programmes and the need to find solutions to these issues.

Sripada renovation programme

The Sripada season is over now. Were you among those who visited the sacred footprint of the Buddha during this period? If so, you may have noticed that most of the steps leading up the Adam’s Peak mountain to the sacred area are worn and needing repairs.

This is especially so in the ascending (going up) steps. It has been discovered that over 14,000 of the rock-cut steps in the ascending stairs are completely worn out and have gone without any repairs, inconveniencing the thousands of pilgrims who climb the peak every year.

The footprint on the peak is considered sacred not only by Buddhists, but also by followers of almost all other religions in the country. Thus, the Ministry of Urban and Sacred Area Development has proposed the implementation of a programme to repair all these steps at Sripada under the advice of the President.

Accordingly, the renovation programme will get under way and the steps are expected to be laid by the 2008-09 pilgrim season.

A sum of six million rupees has already been allocated for this project, which is expected to receive more funds later.