COLOMBO, Sri Lanka: A Tamil member of Parliament warned on Saturday that if the government kept stripping power from the provincial councils, Tamils would “again demand Tamil Eelam.” Tamil Eelam was the independent state the Tamil Tigers fought for in Sri Lanka’s civil war, which ended in 2009. Thurairasa Ravikaran, a Vanni District MP for the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi, or ITAK, made the remark during the second day of debate on the 2027 Budget. The Budget, presented on Thursday by President

By Jaffna Monitor Staff A 15-year-old girl who disappeared from her home in the hills of Kandy District in July has been found living in a forest cave with a baby girl about two months old, police said. She had given birth there without a doctor or midwife. Officers from the Ududumbara Police found the two after noticing that a young man from the area was buying far more rice each day than one person could eat. They followed him into uninhabited forest on the western slopes of the Knuckles ran

By Jaffna Monitor Staff Colombo, 14 November 2026 Shanakiyan Rasamanickam, the parliamentary group leader of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi, told Parliament on Friday that the government was celebrating higher reserves while ordinary families struggled with rising prices. He said the 2027 budget did not address the Tamil national question at all. Mr. Rasamanickam, a member of Parliament for Batticaloa, spoke on the first day of the budget debate. He said a budget speech should do more than s

By Jaffna Monitor Staff Colombo, 14 November 2026 Mano Ganesan, the leader of the Tamil Progressive Alliance, said on Friday that the government’s 2027 budget had failed the Malaiyaha Tamil community. He said it gave no housing figures for the plantations, offered no legal guarantee for estate workers’ pay, and took powers away from the provincial councils. In a statement issued the day after President Anura Kumara Dissanayake presented the budget, Mr. Ganesan, a member of Parliament, set out