Ragging remains one of the most degrading and inhuman practices to which young Sri Lankans are routinely subjected, and it is a national disgrace that we still speak of it in 2026 as though it were an unsolved mystery rather than a plainly documented crime. Students have died. Others have lost limbs, or been left with injuries and trauma that will follow them for the rest of their lives. Many more, unable to bear what is dressed up as "tradition", have simply walked away from degrees they spent years of their young lives earning.
It helps to remember what is actually at stake when an 18-year-old sits the GCE Advanced Level examination. For most Sri Lankan families, it is the single most consequential test their child will ever face, because a place at a State university can be the difference between a life of opportunity and a life of limited prospects. The competition for those places is ferocious precisely because so much rides on it, and yet the reward, when it comes, is remarkable by any standard: a fully funded degree, hostel accommodation, Mahapola scholarships for the highest achievers, and bursaries for students who need them. Parents send their children off to university carrying every hope they have.
What too many of those children find, once they arrive, is not the culture of learning their parents imagined but something closer to a culture of fear. In the name of "initiation", newcomers are humiliated, assaulted and degraded, often systematically and often in full view of senior students who present the abuse as a rite of passage rather than the crime it is. Hundreds endure it in silence, not because they accept it, but because they cannot bring themselves to risk the one opportunity their families have staked so much on. That silence, born of desperation, is precisely what allows ragging to survive.
Successive Governments have introduced measure after measure to rid State universities of this curse, and yet certain groups continue the practice with something close to impunity, at times with the tacit blessing of lecturers who ought to know better. Laws exist. Circulars exist. Disciplinary committees exist. What has been missing, year after year, is the political and institutional will to make those measures mean something, and a willingness on the part of university authorities to treat ragging as the assault it actually is.
It was therefore encouraging to hear Prime Minister and Minister of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education, Dr Harini Amarasuriya, tell the Subcommittee on Higher Education this week that universities must ensure victims have confidence in the investigations conducted into ragging incidents. Speaking at a meeting of the Ministerial Consultative Committee on Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education, held in Parliament under her chairmanship, the Prime Minister said universities carry a moral responsibility to prevent and control ragging, and stressed that investigations must be efficient, effective and capable of delivering relief to victims without delay.
Dr Amarasuriya's own background gives her words particular weight. As a former lecturer at the Open University of Sri Lanka, she is likely to have witnessed, at close quarters, the harassment students endure under the banner of ragging. That experience ought to translate into more than expressions of concern from the floor of Parliament. It should translate into universities that are compelled, not merely encouraged, to protect their students, and into consequences for those who abuse them that are swift and severe enough to actually deter.
Confidence in an investigation is not built by promises, it is built by outcomes. A student who reports being ragged needs to see the person responsible suspended, expelled or prosecuted, not merely moved to another hostel while the case disappears into a committee. Lecturers who look away, or worse, who lend ragging their tacit approval, deserve to face consequences of their own. Anything less simply confirms to the next generation of perpetrators that the system will, in the end, protect them rather than their victims.
No examination result, however hard won, gives one student the right to take away another's dignity, their health or their life. Sri Lanka's State universities exist to open doors, not to break the very young people who fought so hard to walk through them. It is time our institutions matched their rhetoric with resolve, and finally made ragging what it has always deserved to be: a criminal act with no impunity attached to it.