Sri Lanka has decided to formulate a national policy to prevent drowning, through a joint initiative involving four ministries — Defence, Public Security, Education and Public Administration.
The policy will focus on preventing drowning incidents, improving survival skills during water-related emergencies, and training rescue teams, NewsFirst reported at 1.47 p.m. on Saturday.
Basic training in water safety and rescue techniques is expected to be introduced within the school system.
Deputy Minister of Education Dr. Madhura Seneviratne said the national policy would help establish a comprehensive programme to reduce drowning incidents in the country.
Why four ministries
The combination is less arbitrary than it looks, and it maps onto how drowning deaths actually occur in Sri Lanka.
Defence and Public Security cover the services that perform rescues — the Navy, the Coast Guard and the police — and the training of rescue teams the policy names as a focus. Education covers the school curriculum element. Public Administration covers the provincial and divisional machinery that would have to operate any standing arrangement at inland reservoirs, rivers and beaches.
That spread also explains why a policy has been slow to arrive: no single ministry currently owns the problem.
A long-standing gap
The announcement is the latest move in a policy discussion that has run for years without producing a national instrument. Sri Lanka’s drowning deaths occur across both coastal and inland water — reservoirs, rivers, tanks and bathing spots — and recur each year around school holidays and festival periods.
This site has reported repeatedly on the individual incidents that sit behind the statistic, including three young men who drowned at the Victoria reservoir, three drownings at Deduru Oya in Kobeygane, and a teenager at Talpe alongside three children at Hungama over the Vesak holiday.
Ada Derana has separately reported discussions on establishing a national drowning prevention mechanism, and indicated that the Sri Lanka Coast Guard would lead the resulting framework. Its pages could not be fetched to establish a publication date — Ada Derana has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for 38 consecutive days — so it is named here rather than cited.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not say who will draft the policy, which ministry or agency will lead it, or when it is expected to be completed. No committee, chair or secretariat is named.
It gives no figure for annual drowning deaths in Sri Lanka, no timetable for introducing water safety into the school curriculum, no indication of which grades would be covered or whether swimming instruction is contemplated, and no budget.
It also does not say whether the initiative absorbs or replaces the drowning prevention committee previously reported as being formed.
No other verified newsroom had filed a datable report on this decision at the time of writing.
Source: Sri Lanka to formulate national policy to prevent drowning — NewsFirst, October 24.
