Sri Lanka’s plantation sector should open its doors to women professionals as the administration is currently dominated by men, Protem Chairman, Planters’ Association of Ceylon (PA), Rohan Fernando said.
“Today in almost every profession such as medicine, engineering, legal and banking, women professionals’ contribution is immense. But unfortunately, the plantation sector which counts 150 years of service, has not been able to attract female professionals to further develop the industry,” Fernando told the Annual General Meeting of the association last Friday. However, the industry’s lowest paid jobs are dominated by women.
Today the world is witnessing the fourth industrial revolution, the revolution of AI, nanotech, biometrics, the internet of things. But have we seen such changes in our industry, over the last 150 years? , he asked the well-packed audience.
“The tourism industry has also seen huge technological changes. The largest hotel operator in the world doesn’t even own a single room and Airbnb has taken this market by storm.”
He said Jack Ma and his company Alibaba do not own a single store. “Closer to home, the largest transportation companies are Uber and Pick Me and they don’t own a taxi.”
“In the energy sector- we never thought that the US would come up with shale gas and challenge the dominance of the oil industry, today they no longer have the monopoly in oil business because of shale.”
He said that Minister of Digital Infrastructure Harin Fernando has launched a program of a smart classroom, not in Colombo’s elite schools - Visakha or Ladies College - but in rural Badulla, and those children are now learning in a digital classroom.
At the conclusion of the AGM, Sunil Poholiyadde was unanimously re-elected as Chairman of the PA for the ensuing year.
Note: We regret to note that the picture published in Daily News Business section on October 1, 2018 titled ‘Scarcity of Glyphosate despite ban removal’ was published with an image of Dr. Rohan Fernando in his capacity as Protem Chairman of the Annual General Meeting, and was erroneously captioned as being Planters’ Association Chairman, Sunil Poholiyadde. We apologise the error.
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