Sri Lanka

Topic: South Asia

Why in the news?

• Sri Lanka’s election commission declared Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a previously fringe politician, the country’s President-elect after a vote coloured by discontent over the island nation’s response to an unprecedented financial crisis.

Source: The Hindu 

About Sri Lanka:

• It was historically known as Ceylon.
• It is an island country in South Asia. 
• It lies in the Indian Ocean, southwest of the Bay of Bengal.
• It is separated from the Indian peninsula by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait. 
• It shares a maritime border with the Maldives in the southwest and India in the northwest.
• It is shaped as a teardrop or a pear/mango.
• It consists mostly of flat to rolling coastal plains, with mountains rising only in the south-central part. The highest point is Pidurutalagala (2,524 m. above sea level).
• It has 103 rivers. The longest of these is the Mahaweli River, extending 335 km. 
• Its mangrove ecosystem spans over 7,000 hectares and played a vital role in buffering the force of the waves in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
• It is rich in minerals such as ilmenite, feldspar, graphite, silica, kaolin, mica and thorium.
• Existence of petroleum and gas in the Gulf of Mannar has also been confirmed, and the extraction of recoverable quantities is underway.
• It is a democratic republic and a unitary state which is governed by a semi-presidential system. It is the oldest democracy in Asia. The Constitution of Sri Lanka officially declares it to be a socialist state.
• It is a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). 
• Presently, it is also a member of the Commonwealth, the SAARC, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and the Colombo Plan