Lost in translation: How Sri Lanka’s Tamils face repeated disaster warning failures

By Tharushi Weerasinghe and Sandran Rubatheesan

COLOMBO/JAFFNA – Sivanu Dayalan lost his home and livelihood to the landslides and floods triggered by Cyclone Ditwah, which swept across Sri Lanka nearly a month ago, but it could have been even worse for him and his family due to early warning failures and the enduring marginalization of Tamil-speaking communities.

When the country’s worst disaster since the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami struck on November 27, the 43-year-old labourer did not receive warnings in Tamil, the language he speaks and one of Sri Lanka’s two official languages. The few warnings issued came in Sinhala and English, while Tamil – spoken by millions of Sri Lankans like him – was completely left out.

“I am lucky I was home when the landslide struck,” Dayalan told The New Humanitarian. His house – in the hard-hit central district of Matale – had been a refuge for 18 others displaced by the floods, but when the waters triggered landslides, they too had to flee. “We can only see part of the rooftop now because everything else is under mud.”

Had Dayalan not been home that night, his wife, his three young children, and his elderly parents would all have had to escape on their own. He said none of the approximately 20 families living on tea plantations close by received any warning of what was coming.

As of December 17, the government-run Disaster Management Centre (DMC) reported 643 deaths from Cyclone Ditwah. Nearly 200 people are still missing, and 1.7 million have been impacted by the storms – meaning they have been displaced or their homes have been damaged. Estimated economic losses amount to $6 billion, or 3.5% of Sri Lanka’s GDP.

The DMC said 32 million text alerts were sent out, but The New Humanitarian found that many people, especially in at-risk areas, did not receive them. In plantations, predominantly Malayaigi Tamil families (descended from communities in India) had to depend on social media for news that never came to them in a language they understood.

According to Nagamuthu Naguleshwary, chair of the Uva Farmers Development Foundation, which seeks to empower plantation communities in Uva Province’s Badulla district, historically marginalized tea estate workers face an added layer of risk because information is often filtered to them through their employers, who still control many aspects of their lives. This can lead to gaps in disaster preparedness and response because these additional vulnerabilities aren’t factored in, Naguleshwary explained.

Tamils, 12.2% of the population, have faced discrimination on language and political rights since Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948. Hindu-majority Tamils in the Northern and Eastern Provinces staged a separatist campaign in the late 1980s that was brought to a bloody end in 2009.

The New Humanitarian’s reporting underlines how legacies of marginalization persist to this day, and how they have combined with government failures in implementing early warning best practice to produce dangerous gaps in protection for vulnerable communities.

Was there a warning?

The DMC has been repeatedly investigated for translation failures, exposing a disconnect between policies the state subscribes to – like the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the UN’s Early Warnings for All (EW4A) initiative – and actions by officials on the ground.

While Sri Lanka has established a national multi-hazard early warning system, the communications breakdown during Cyclone Ditwah raises serious doubts about whether the ‘last-mile connectivity’ and ‘inclusive, people-centred’ approaches mandated under EW4A exist beyond paper commitments.

Government agencies issued contradictory reports about when warnings were activated.

While the Meteorology Department claims it issued warnings on November 12, red alerts predicting extreme rainfall only came on November 25.

The Met Department severely understated the rainfall scale, predicting 75-150 mm, but some of the worst-affected areas, like Matale, saw nearly 1,000 mm, according to official sources who spoke to The New Humanitarian on condition of anonymity.

Critically, warnings in the Tamil language often didn’t come at all, even though census data shows many of the most vulnerable areas have predominantly Tamil-speaking communities.

“There were no prior warnings from authorities,” Jesimathuran Kunaratnam, a 28-year-old farmer in Northern Province’s Jaffna district, told The New Humanitarian. Everything in his five-acre paddy fields was washed away. Hitting so close to harvest season, the cyclone’s impacts were devastating.

Trying to fill the gap

When government institutions failed to issue forecasts in Tamil, Professor Nagamuthu Piratheeparajah, head of geography at the University of Jaffna, tried to fill that gap.

On October 17, he alerted his 35,000 Facebook followers of higher rainfall if depressions in the Bay of Bengal turned towards the country. He reiterated his analysis on November 17, a full week before the authorities. By November 23, he predicted severe cyclone impacts, long before the Meteorology Department’s declaration.

“I have never seen anything like this,” Piratheeparajah told The New Humanitarian. He believes earlier government action could have prevented deaths, particularly in the central region, where 282 people died. Piratheeparajah said he is certain “there was a delay in disseminating critical warnings on potential landslides in Tamil”.

Most digital communications from disaster-response agencies showed alerts primarily in Sinhala and English. Where Tamil translations existed, they often lacked critical information.

“We were told to be careful, but not how serious it would be,” said 60-year-old fisherman Nathkunam Pathmanathan from Batticaloa, a district in Eastern Province where more than 37,000 people have been directly impacted by the storm. His home became submerged under three feet of water. “Seawater entered for the first time,” he recalled. “We knew where the safety centre was, but the floods cut us off.”

Deputy DMC Director Janaka Handunpathiraja said the lack of translators hampered Tamil communications at the national level, though he said regional officers filled the gap.

On the ground, though, the reality was different.

A senior DMC official in Jaffna said his office received warnings in Sinhala and English, which he translated into Tamil before sharing via WhatsApp. But farmers in Kilinochchi, a district in Northern Province, said the Tamil translation arrived nearly three hours after the original warnings and often lacked important lifesaving information.

“There was a delay in receiving the Tamil-translated warnings in the group, but once we received it, we quickly disseminated the message to all available avenues, including social media,” said Iranaimadhu Farmers’ Federation Secretary Muthu Sivamohan.

The DMC justifies its reliance on mass media and social media on the basis that “everyone has a phone now”. But in Kandy, Badulla, and Nuwara Eliya – the districts recording the highest death tolls – Badulla’s DMC deputy director Lal Udaya Kumara said Malayaigi Tamils often follow Indian channels instead of local ones.

The DMC’s protocols include alerts via SMS, Grama Sevaka (public official) visits, police announcements, and regional DMC office communications – but storm survivors said all of these failed to warn certain communities in time.

Tamil-language communication is largely left to field officers because they tend to be local hires who speak the community’s languages.

“Top-down communication doesn’t always work because some people in the community are tuned out of local communications altogether,” Kumara said, adding that rain gauges had been distributed and awareness sessions held, though not regularly. “When they attend one, they will remember it for life,” he added.

Kumara acknowledged that cultural and linguistic barriers exist, with most officers being Sinhalese, and that training is not always done in Tamil. “Many Tamil people know Sinhala, but we get translators where necessary,” he said.

But Tamil-speaking communities themselves told a different story.

“The awareness sessions are always organised through the companies, not with direct contact with us, so they are rarely effective,” said Naguleshwary, the chair of the farmers’ federation in Badulla. She said no alerts reached them, adding: “Since updates are not posted in Tamil, we missed a lot of them. A lot of people stayed in their homes out of unawareness and lost their lives.” 

“When the electricity went out for three days, we couldn’t even make a phone call,” she said, adding that language discrimination extends far beyond disaster warnings: “We can’t even walk into a government office and get a basic form in Tamil, [so] how will they communicate a disaster to us in a language we understand?”

A systemic failure

Sanjana Hattotuwa, a Colombo-based researcher on information integrity and public policy, said the problem is systemic. His research into the digital communications of Sri Lanka’s disaster agencies found serious language gaps in official warnings.

Detailed landslide alerts from the National Building Research Organisation were issued only in Sinhala, despite the hill country having large Tamil-speaking populations. River flood warnings were released in Sinhala and English, while some emergency helpline announcements labelled “trilingual” were posted only in Sinhala.

Although the Meteorology Department issued some alerts in Tamil, they were fewer and far less detailed than those in Sinhala. Tamil-speaking communities were left with basic forecasts and cyclone tracking updates, missing extended planning alerts, lightning warnings, and official responses to misinformation.

Sri Lanka’s disaster communication systems shifted online after the 2004 tsunami, but “communications have been weighted towards Sinhala ever since”, Hattotuwa said, calling it an institutional failure. “Information asymmetry can be the difference between life and death. When trilingual messaging is treated as optional, it reflects a deeper unwillingness to communicate in Tamil – across every channel, digital or otherwise.”

The Sri Lankan Constitution guarantees citizens the right to receive government services in one of the national languages of their choice, yet many state offices lack bilingual staff.

Sri Lanka’s Official Languages Commission launched an ongoing probe in early December over the DMC’s failure to issue critical warnings in Tamil over Cyclone Ditwah.

“The DMC is a repeat offender, and we have audited them in previous years also,” Nimal Ranawaka, chairman of the independent commission, said, adding that the lack of bilingual state employees remains the biggest reason behind violations.

Civil society activist Ainkaran Kugadasan stressed that critical warnings in Tamil should have reached the central regions, where Malayaigi Tamil plantation communities reside. “In addition to the language gap, the unavailability of the local cellular network made things worse,” he said. “If the DMC cannot ensure warnings are translated into Tamil by employing adequate translators, what is the point of funding this state agency?”

While most flood waters have now receded, the north-east monsoon has kept risks high. Some families are still housed in safety centres, unable to return home.

At around 6:00 p.m. on November 27, Thiyagarajah Malarmalligai was at home in Kandy with her three children when the walls began to crack, and floodwaters rushed in. “The walls collapsed, and we ran to a nearby Hindu temple until we knew we were safe,” she recalled. Since then, the family has been moving between their damaged home and a relative’s house, depending on the weather.

The first time a Grama Sevaka official visited was after the monsoon intensified last week (several weeks after the storm), when he told her to go “somewhere safe” whenever it rained. Thiyagarajah is bilingual and understood the Sinhala he spoke, but the lack of clear guidance left her uncertain what to do.

Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has announced compensation for those affected by Cyclone Ditwah, but Thiyagarajah said she has received no information about eligibility or next steps. “We built this house just a year ago,” she said. “Now, everything we owned is gone. If life starts again, it will start without us; we don’t even have our children’s school uniforms to send them back to class.”

-Tharushi Weerasinghe is a journalist and documentarian based in Colombo, and Sandran Rubatheesan is a journalist and documentary photographer based in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. This article was originally featured on thenewhumanitarian.org