Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya has said universities carry a moral responsibility to prevent and control ragging, and that students subjected to it must have confidence in the procedures set up to investigate it, the Daily Mirror reported on Thursday.
She made the remarks at a meeting of the Subcommittee on Higher Education, convened under the Ministerial Consultative Committee on Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education, held at Parliament under her own chairmanship.
The meeting covered two subjects: vacancies across the higher education sector, particularly at universities, and incidents of ragging.
The emphasis is on the aftermath, not the prohibition
Amarasuriya did not announce a new rule, a sanction or a deadline. Her stated concern was with what happens once a complaint is made.
Investigations into ragging complaints should be efficient and effective, she said, and conducted so that affected students receive relief without delay. She also pressed the need to strengthen confidence in the mechanisms universities already have for investigating and addressing ragging.
That is a statement about institutional credibility rather than about the conduct itself — the implicit diagnosis being that the machinery exists but that students subjected to ragging do not trust it enough to use it.
The second meeting on the same agenda in a week
The Prime Minister put closely related instructions to what appears to be the same body on 10 September, when she told universities that sensitive cases involving student harassment must not be overlooked and called for a campus environment free of harassment and violence. That meeting also took up the recruitment backlog, with the University Grants Commission presenting progress figures for 2025 and 2026.
The pairing of the same two agenda items — vacancies and student welfare — recurs here.
The body’s name has now been reported three different ways. The Daily Mirror called it the Subcommittee on the Higher Education Sector on 11 September and the Subcommittee on Higher Education, convened under the Ministerial Consultative Committee on Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education on 17 September; NewsFirst called it the Advisory Sub-Committee on Higher Education. The participants and remit indicate one committee, not three.
Amarasuriya’s standing on the subject
The Prime Minister holds the higher education portfolio herself and was an academic before entering politics, which gives her instructions to vice-chancellors more force than a routine ministerial direction. Ragging has been a persistent disciplinary problem in the Sri Lankan university system, and government statements condemning it are a recurring feature rather than a novelty — which is part of why the durability of this particular intervention is hard to assess from the reporting.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror does not date the meeting, so it cannot be established from the report whether this was a fresh sitting or a further account of the 10 September one. It does not say what prompted the ragging discussion or whether any specific incident or institution was before the subcommittee, and it gives no figures — no count of complaints made, investigations completed, students disciplined or cases still open.
On the vacancies half of the agenda, the report carries no detail at all: no number of posts unfilled, no named universities, and no explanation for the delay. Our 11 September coverage established that funding approval for those appointments is already in place, which makes the institutions’ own processes the outstanding question — and it remains unanswered.
A widely circulated search result headlined “PM declares zero-tolerance policy on university ragging” is an August 2025 article and does not describe this meeting.
Update, 18 September: the vacancies half, and who is being held to account
NewsFirst has filed its own account of the same subcommittee meeting, and it covers the half the Daily Mirror left blank.
Amarasuriya instructed Vice-Chancellors directly to take the measures needed to fill existing university vacancies efficiently — and, more pointedly, questioned the Vice-Chancellors on why appointments had not yet been made to vacancies the Ministry had already approved.
That closes the gap identified above. The unfilled posts are not awaiting funding or ministerial sign-off; the approvals exist and the appointments have not followed. The Prime Minister put that discrepancy to the vice-chancellors in person, which identifies the universities’ own recruitment processes as the obstacle and the vice-chancellors as the parties answerable for it.
On ragging, NewsFirst’s account matches the Daily Mirror’s: investigations must be conducted so as to instil confidence in students who have been subjected to it, and the university administration bears a moral responsibility to curb it.
The two filings together also make the meeting itself easier to place. Both describe the same body and the same pairing of agenda items — vacancies and ragging — which indicates a single sitting reported by two outlets a day apart, rather than a third meeting on the same agenda. Neither outlet dates it, so the question raised above is narrowed but not formally closed.
NewsFirst still gives no count of unfilled posts, names no university, and reports no answer from the vice-chancellors to the Prime Minister’s question.
