SLIIT Northern Uni, ICT and Business Management Degrees in Jaffna

By Jekhan Aruliah

I often walk past the SLIIT Northern Uni building in Jaffna at the junction of Arasadi and Palaly Road on my way from my place to Jaffna Town. I watched last year, 2023, with great interest as the foundations were laid, the columns and slabs were poured, the glass was fitted. There grew an impressive structure, now completed and milling with cool confident young people coming and going. Casual relaxed cheerful undergraduates, they could have been in any campus around the World. Now they are here, glowing youth in a shining new building in tatty old Jaffna. We have several tertiary (diploma, degree and beyond) education establishments in Jaffna, including Jaffna University. Many of them highly respected. Northern Uni (NU), a joint venture by SLIIT and the Canadian diaspora investor Indrakumar “Indy” Pathmanathan, is the most ambitious private college I have seen in Jaffna to date. Even this fine new building is just another step towards their planned major campus spread over tens of acres.

I had often walked past but I had never been inside. Until I was invited to be a guest at their Dean’s List prizegiving. Invited by my friend Rajan Bala, a Canadian diasporan who built a career in California’s Silicon Valley. Rajan, now in his 40s, decided to spend 4-5 years ‘giving back’ to the Northern community. Diaspora don’t only have money to give back as donations and investments, important as that can be. They have their personal time, skills, and crucially their personal networks to find customers and investors. Rajan has brought projects and knowhow to Jaffna companies from his North American network. Indy, the Canadian investor, is another diasporan providing the capital and the vision to bring SLIIT on this major scale North. Here we see the true potential and power of the Diaspora. Potential and power still seen too rarely in the Northern Province.

The tour of the inside was even more impressive than the outside, seeing the human as well as the physical structure. Putting up a great glass building takes money: buy the land; pay the architect; fund the contractor. Building a university takes much more.

My mother had taught her 3 children when assessing a place to first look at the toilets. When my parents dropped us at our university colleges in England, my mother conducted that inspection by eye and nose (she doesn’t touch). Fortunately for us those venerable colleges, founded centuries ago by medieval English nobility, passed her sharp inspections! Following the example of my mother I looked at the Northern Uni’s toilets. They were perfectly spic and span. I noticed important little things: the abundant fire extinguishers and alarms all in place, the cleanliness of the common areas. And the quiet focused order in the classrooms. My visit was a surprise to the classes, and though unprepared they couldn’t have been better prepared.

Northern Uni is a vision made real by Indrakumar “Indy” Pathmanathan. Born in Manipay Jaffna, Indy and his brothers like tens of thousands of others left Sri Lanka for Canada at the beginning of the civil war in 1983. True entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs by choice and apptitude not by need and circumstance, are a rarity in the educated section of the Sri Lankan Tamil community. A community that by nature aspire to and thrive in professional jobs. Indy is a true entrepreneur, building a successful furniture business based in Canada, MagickWoods. His company based in Toronto makes kitchen and bathroom furniture which are sold through some of the major North American outlets including Home Depot, Menards and Lowe’s. While started in Toronto, MagickWoods now has locations across the World including USA, India and Sri Lanka.

Indy wanted to give back to Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, and thus to Sri Lanka. One of the much talked about deficiencies in Sri Lanka is its education system. The government tertiary (beyond school) education system lacks the capacity to absorb all the qualified students. Its curricula drag behind the real world in relevance, failing to teach what the economy needs and what their graduates will thrive on. To use an alimentary allusion, from school to university the system trains its students to regurgitate not to digest. This is not only for technological sectors. Everybody needs to digest and understand the new which is coming faster and faster. With lightning change it’s not enough to memorise and regurgitate the old. Lawyers won’t need to read and remember thousands of pages, engineers and architects will use new AI tools to do their designs. If all a student can do is regurgitate then they will surely choke as new technologies make them irrelevant.

Northern Uni is a collaboration between Indy’s MagickGroup and SLIIT. SLIIT is a well established degree awarding institution, operating since 1999. Recognised by the Sri Lanka Government’s UGC (University Grants Commission), its graduates are well regarded as employees particularly in the tech industry. When I look at a CV and see SLIIT, I take it more seriously.

NU offers 5 scholarships per year available to the 3 top students at A’Level from each district in the Northern Province through its YES Fund (Yarl Education Support Fund). This scholarship includes a generous living allowance. Conservative Northern parents, reluctant to send their daughters to distant cities like Colombo, are happy for them to attend NU and come home every evening. The Jaffna boys too appreciate the NU campus, with its proximity to Amma’s cooking and ironing, and to Amma.

NU has signed MOUs with a number of Jaffna tech companies to take interns. The bait NU uses when necessary to get the MOUs is giving these companies access to its network of Diaspora, headed by Rajan Bala, to find projects and partners overseas.

SLIIT, being an island wide institution, maintains close connections with industry. In particular those industries its alumni go to. These connections keep SLIIT Northern Uni’s curricula relevant. SLIIT Northern Uni can watch what the industries need now, and what they will need in the medium term future. By the end of 2024 NU is introducing diplomas in AI and robotics, brought from diplomas already running in SLIIT’s Colombo campus.

One of the great needs in the North is Business Management (BM). NU recently setup this department, headed by a senior professor from Jaffna University on a 2 year sabbatical, Professor B. Nimalathasan. Before his sabbatical the professor had been Dean of Jaffna University’s Faculty of Management Studies and Commerce. Nimalathasan is now responsible for developing the Business Management Faculty at NU.

**Prof Nimalathasan (Head, Business Management); Rajan Bala (Head ICT); Jekhan Aruliah (article author**)

Many Northern businesses, including the cooperatives, are naïve. They have well qualified and talented but inexperienced staff. They have the ability to make great stuff, but lack the expertise to market and price the products/services; manage supply chain, manage cashflow; etc. They lack the experience to grow, to stretch, and to evolve to their potential. Many in the North that do have these skills have executives who worked outside the North, or brought them in from Diaspora professionals. Companies without these skills may struggle to achieve their potential to bring wealth, jobs, and economic development to the North. During the war Northern companies rarely looked beyond their closed borders, business management was hardly an issue. Now their market is the whole country and is World. Their competition too is coming from the World. Northern companies that thrived protected by wartime embargos have collapsed unable to compete in their own backyards. I have myself visited food, drink, and textile companies some emerging from and some still in this precarious predicament.

SLIIT Northern Uni’s teaching staff include graduates from universities of Jaffna, Uva Wellisara, Vavuniya. Half are SLIIT graduates, many who have gained real commercial experience spending a few years in industry before returning to teach. Though the students are all Tamil speakers, the courses are strictly taught in English. English classes are delivered by British Council certified teachers. Proficiency in English by itself opens doors even a degree doesn’t.

NU has plans long, medium and short. From developing a full scale multi-acre campus, to extending its reach to schoolkids. NU will be introducing A’Level Business Management aimed at school children. Aiming to introduce to the kids before they make their further education and degree choice, and to their parents their aunties and their potential in-laws, there are prestigious lucrative careers other than Doctor; Accountant; Engineer.

( — The writer Jekhan Aruliah was born in Sri Lanka and moved with his family to the UK when he was two years of age. Brought up in London, he graduated from Cambridge University in 1986 with a degree in Natural Sciences. Jekhan then spent over two decades in the IT industry, for half of which he was managing offshore software development for British companies in Colombo and in Gurgaon (India). In 2015 Jekhan decided to move to Jaffna where he is now involved in social and economic projects. He can be contacted at jekhanaruliah@gmail.com — )