Civil servants undergo training in India
05-Oct-2025.
Forty senior Sri Lankan civil service officers participated in a special capacity-building training programme at India’s National Centre for Good Governance on the theme “Clean Cities, Better Futures: Transforming Urban Sri Lanka with Regional Practices,” the Indian High Commission in Colombo said in a statement.
The statement said that, in coordination with the ‘Pure Sri Lanka’ initiative announced by President Ranil Wickremesinghe on January 1, and India’s ‘Swachh Bharat Mission’ under the ‘Swachhata Hi Seva 2025’ campaign, forty senior Sri Lankan civil service officers attended a special capacity-building training programme at India’s National Centre for Good Governance from September 22 to October 3 of this month. The core theme of the programme was “Clean Cities, Better Futures: Transforming Urban Sri Lanka with Regional Practices.”
The programme’s core idea was selected to support sustainable urban management, environmental responsibility and citizen participation, reflecting the goals of both national initiatives.
Participants engaged in expert-led sessions covering urban planning, municipal administration, public–private partnerships in urban sectors, the importance of plastic waste recycling and solid waste management, local-level innovation and behavioural change, and urban transport, among other key areas.
Field visits to leading institutions relevant to the programme’s theme — such as the National Urban Affairs Agency, the Mussoorie–Dehradun Development Authority, the Integrated Tribal Development Agency, projects that convert southern wastes into energy, and the Delhi Metro Rail project — provided practical insights into notable initiatives aligned with the programme’s objectives.
Participants were able to directly experience new practices in municipal administration, urban infrastructure, waste-to-energy solutions and citizen-centred public services.
This is the fifth capacity-building training programme under the Memorandum of Understanding signed in December 2024 between India’s National Centre for Good Governance and the Sri Lanka Administrative Service, aimed at training 1,500 Sri Lankan civil servants over five years.
With this training, the total number of officers trained under the MOU has reached 201.
Based on very positive participant feedback and at the request of the Sri Lankan government, a sixth programme under the MOU with the same theme will be held, and it will include forty Sri Lankan civil servants, the statement added.
