President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared 2009 as Sri Lanka's Year of English and IT.

In the ‘Mahinda Chintana’, my election manifesto which received the endorsement of the people, we recognized the importance of rapidly creating a knowledge society in Sri Lanka. To make the idea of the global village more meaningful to our people, we stressed the importance of linking the villages and townships in all the provinces and districts of our country with the outside world of knowledge, said President Rajapaksa.

The Government is using English and IT as instruments of rural empowerment; as powerful tools that could make the villages of our country a meaningful part of the global village.

In the use of IT for rural empowerment, the country can be proud of the success achieved in the past few years. IT literacy in the country is now above 20%. The establishment of 579 Nenasalas or rural tele-centres and 2,500 IT labs in schools, has been largely instrumental for this increase. The goal of the Government is to enhance the number of Nenasalas to 1,000 and to reach 50% of IT literacy by the end of 2010.

Household computer ownership

According to the Department of Census and Statistic's Computer Literacy Survey (CLS), the computer ownership at household level has increased during 2004 to 2009 in every surveyed province, and the Western and Central provinces shows the highest.

The CLS 2009 results reveal that on average at least one computer is available for every ten households in Sri Lanka. The household computer availability in the urban sector is 23.6% where a computer is available in one out of every four households. In the Rural and Estate sectors, computer availability per household is 9.2% and 3.1% respectively.

It is also revealed that 73 percent of the households have acquired the first computer during the last five years (2005 – 2009) and the rural sector shows a higher recent acquisition (75%) than the urban sector (66%).


Computer awareness

It is evident that computer awareness has increased in all the Provinces from 2006/07 to 2009. The Eastern Province and the Sabaragamuwa Province have each gained about 50 percent increase.


Computer literacy

Among the provinces, the highest level of computer literacy is reported from the Western Province (28%) and the lowest from the Eastern Province (13%). Three decades of terrorism at its height in this province could be one of the reasons.

According to the survey, computer literacy among males (22%) is only a little higher than that of females (19%) in 2009. The young generation (aged 15 – 19 years) shows the highest computer literacy rate among all the age groups from 5 to 69 years and the older age groups beyond 50 years show comparatively low computer literacy rate.

The G.C.E. (A/L) and above qualified groups show the highest computer literacy rate which is close to 60 percent. According to the survey results, the literacy in English language has greatly contributed to raise the computer literacy. Those who are literate in English show nearly 3 times higher computer literacy rate (56%) than those not competent in English.

Computer literacy among the employed population in Sri Lanka is above 40 percent in 2009. The higher the position, such as senior officials and managers (86%), Professionals (72%), Technical and Associate professionals (70%), and Clerks (77%) are computer literate. However, nearly 20 percent of computer literacy is recorded from individuals engaged in the category of Elementary occupations as well.

The survey results have revealed that about 12 percent of the household population aged 5 – 69 years have used e–mail facility at least once during the last 12 months. Highest e-mail use is recorded from the Western Province (18.5%) followed by the Central province (12.3%).The lowest e–mail use (5%) among the provinces was recorded from the North-Western Province.

Overall, the IT sector shows an enormous improvement within the last four years with computer literacy expanding throughout the country. IT has spread even in the Eastern Province which was plagued by terrorism for nearly three decades. Sri Lankans are increasingly becoming aware of the advantages of IT and further seeking to make it a part of their lives.