Mendis Wickramasinghe Archives

SRI LANKA NEWS – NOVEMBER 2020-Compiled by Victor Melder. Sri Lanka’s emergency needs in various sectors including agriculture, education, ICT, transport and disaster management brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic are to be handled at cost of over Rs.10 billion under the Contingent Emergency Response Components (CERCs) framework, a Finance Ministry report revealed. Following the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, the ministry has requested the banks to activate several CERCs in the existing portfolio to finance a set of emergency activities for the COVID-19 response. The funds from several project CERCs will be “pooled” into one Designated Account (DA) to finance a common emergency action plan and similar activities, the Treasury document disclosed. A sum of Rs. 3.15 billion has been set aside to assist agriculture and food security during COVID -19 while Rs. 985.28 million was allocated for the establishment of a system for tele-education and e-learning for school ...

Two species of snakes from Knuckles-by Nayanajeewa Bandara Source:Dailymirror A group of researchers, including one of the leading herpetologists in Sri Lanka, Mendis Wickramasinghe and Herpetology Researcher at Natural History Museum, London, Evolutionary Biologist Dr. David Gower, has been able to discover two species of snakes endemic to Sri Lanka in Riverston and Rassagala, Balangoda in the Knuckles mountain range. Researches say that with these two discoveries, the number of endemic snakes in Sri Lanka increases to 108 and the number of shieldtail snakes increases to 18. This new species of snakes discovered in Riverston area of Knuckles mountain range situated at an elevation of 1400 metres above the sea level, show similarity to Phillip’s Earth Snake in its outward appearance. This new species has been named Gunasekara’s Shieldtail. ...