SIDA–IT PROJECT
In 1997 a team of IT consultants were sent to Sri Lanka by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) with a mission to explore the possibilities to promote the IT infrastructure in Sri lankas academic and research institutions. As a first step, they had selected a handful of Universities and research institutions which already had ongoing projects with SIDA support. University of Ruhuna was among the selected institutions, together with the Universitie of Colombo and Peradeniya, and NARA. They also selected the hub of the Lanka Educational Academic and Research Network (LEARN) that provides Internet access to those institutions.
Through the initiative of the Institute of Computer Technology (ICT), University of Colombo , funds were also provided for a split phD programme in which participating universities could send their junior staff members to Sweden in order to read for their phD degrees. They would, however, spend part of their time in Sri Lanka continuing their research activities.
While the ICT was responsible for the overall coordination of the project, Dr. S.C .Jayawardena of he Department of Computer Science acted as the project coordinator for the University of Ruhuna.
Under the IT infrastructure support for Ruhuna, funds were provided to lay a fiber optic backbone at the main campus site in Wellamadama, Matara and to improve infrastructure facilities of the Department of Fisheries Biology and Computer science. Two staff members of the Department of Computer science could start their phD programmes under the split phD programme.
All Universities that are connected through the LEARN hub profited by the support given to the LEARN . All the links were upgraded to 2 MB from 64 K or or 128K connections and the international link was also upgraded to 512K. 64K link from Ruhuna to the LEARN hub was supplemented by a 2MB radio link under this.
Having successfully achieved the envisaged goals of the project , the University hopes to seek assistance from SIDA to improve IT infrastructure in the other three faculties of the university of Ruhuna - Faculty of Agricultue, Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Medicine.