Keynote on how racism, institutional decay and information vacuums compound natural disasters
The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) marked its sixth anniversary today (30) with an event titled “Frontlines of Truth: Reporting in Times of Crisis” focusing on crisis reporting and the professional, ethical, and practical challenges faced by journalists during emergencies.
Featured expert speaker Dr. Sanjana Hattotuwa, researcher and founding editor of Groundviews offered the audience an insightful presentation titled “When racism, institutional decay, and information vacuums compound natural disasters: A reflection on Cyclone Ditwah, ” Dr. Hattotuwa spoke on information vacuums, systemic racism, the denial of life-saving warnings to the Tamil speaking people, colossal institutional failures and the digitalization of exclusion. He also called upon journalists to move beyond reactive reporting and to hold power to account through in-depth public service journalism.
Following is the full transcript of Dr. Hattotuwa’s remarks:
I want to start with someone else’s reporting. Tharushi Weerasinghe and Sandran Rubatheesan documented something for The New Humanitarian that’s profoundly sad and should make all of us very uncomfortable.
Sivanu Dayalan, 43, a labourer in Matale is quoted saying: “I am lucky I was home when the landslide struck.” His house had sheltered 18 others displaced by floods. When the waters triggered landslides, they all had to flee. “We can only see part of the rooftop now because everything else is under mud.” He received no warnings in Tamil. None of the approximately 20 families on nearby tea plantations received any warning of what was coming. Had he not been home that night, his wife, three young children, and elderly parents would have had to escape on their own. Or not at all.
The article also quotes Nathkunam Pathmanathan, 60, a fisherman in Batticaloa: “We were told to be careful, but not how serious it would be.”
643 dead by 17 December. Nearly 200 still missing.
How many of those deaths could have been prevented? This isn’t just about better infrastructure and early warning systems, though we certainly need both. Timely and basic fundamental communication, especially in Tamil, would have been crucial. Clearly, the lack of communication proved, quite literally, deadly to our Tamil-speaking peoples.
This is a story not just of climate change, but criminal negligence.
The warnings missed
Let me walk you through what was happening across the Bay of Bengal whilst Sri Lankan officials, and even mainstream media remained silent.
I studied the titles of 939 articles featuring ‘Ditwah’ in just English between 25 November and 25 December 2025 across major Sri Lankan news websites. The reporting followed an entirely predictable trajectory. Initial warnings and casualty counts. International aid announcements. Economic damage quantification by early December. Parliamentary processes and infrastructure vulnerability documentation by mid-December. By late December, structural critique dominated: system failures, language discrimination, elite-controlled relief, transparency demands.
| Period | Dominant trends |
| 25-29 November | Initial cyclone warnings; early casualty counts (3 killed, then 69 dead); cyclone formation and tracking; flight disruptions; immediate emergency responses |
| 30 November – 2 December | Rapidly escalating death toll (132→212→334→366 dead); missing persons counts; international aid announcements (India, Japan, China, Pakistan, UAE); emergency military deployments; Opposition walkout over ignored warnings |
| 3-8 December | Death toll stabilises (474-479 dead); economic damage quantification begins ($4.1 billion World Bank estimate); IMF emergency financing ($200-206 million); institutional failure narratives emerge; Tamil language warning gaps highlighted |
| 9-13 December | ‘Rebuilding Sri Lanka’ fund establishment and growth tracking; sectoral damage assessments (railways, agriculture, industry); international development partner pledges; climate justice framing emerges; infrastructure vulnerability documentation |
| 14-18 December | Parliamentary processes (Rs 500 billion supplementary estimate); accountability debates intensify; marginalisation narratives (women, North-East, Hill Country exclusion); corporate donation tracking; emergency regulation controversies |
| 19-25 December | Death toll reaches 640; structural critique dominates (‘system failures’, ‘policy blunders’); calls for climate finance; criticism of elite-dominated relief; delayed Auditor General appointment controversy; long-term reconstruction debates; transparency and accountability demands |
But how were early warnings communicated initially?
On 16 November: Bengali-language weather forecasters on Facebook were already predicting cyclone formation between 22-26 November. Specific posts identified Sri Lanka’s eastern coastal regions as potentially at risk. They named the storm: Senyar or Ditwah. On the same day: Bangladeshi forecasters were warning their publics. Weather pages in Myanmar were warning their publics. By 23 November, Vietnamese forecasters were tracking the system.
What was happening in Sri Lanka?
On 2 December 2025, I went through 138 articles featuring “Ditwah”, in English, දිත්වා in Sinhala, and திட்வா in Tamil, also across every major news website.
Every single article was published after 26 November. After the cyclone had struck.
The Meteorology Department’s Director General now claims warnings were issued on 12 November. I checked this. The Met Department’s official Facebook page does indeed have a post from 12 November. The post contains 15 images: one for each day of a fortnight forecast. The absolutely chilling weather maps showing extreme rainfall across Sri Lanka, much like what actually happened on 25 November, were the penultimate, and last images in the album. Caption just read in English only: “Weather forecasts obtained through numerical models for the next 15 days.”
There was no explicit warning. No alert language. No sense of urgency. No reference to the last two images, and related weather patterns. No framing in Tamil or Sinhala. It was a run-of-the-mill technical post requiring you to manually open, and scroll through 15 images to find the concerning forecast buried right at the end.
That post had two shares. Even the 39,000 people following the Met Department on Facebook didn’t think it important enough to circulate.
There was one domestic warning before Ditwah struck. Precisely one. On 24 November at 4.52pm, a lawyer called Dishan Manamperi posted on Facebook in Sinhala, warning of severe rainfall between 26-29 November. He urged immediate preparation. His post got 2,400 views and one share.
Weather forecasters across the Bay of Bengal were tracking and warning about Ditwah from 16 November onwards. Sri Lankan mainstream media published nothing. Not a single journalist monitored regional meteorological discourse. Not one editor asked why Bengali and Burmese forecasters were sounding alarms whilst our Met Department posted technical forecasts without explicit warnings.
This wasn’t just a failure of individual journalists. It reveals something structural: no one in Sri Lankan journalism is trained to report on early warning systems, disasters, and climate change as an ongoing beat. There’s coverage when disasters hit: casualty counts, damage assessments, human interest stories.
Then silence until the next crisis.
The UN’s Early Warnings for All initiative and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction both emphasise that effective disaster reporting requires rigorous, long-term focus. Journalists need to understand meteorological data, track regional weather systems, interrogate gaps between technical forecasts and public communication, and also monitor whether vulnerable communities receive timely information in accessible languages.
None of this exists in Sri Lankan newsrooms. No disaster and climate change desks. No journalists who spend months between disasters examining early warning infrastructure, testing whether SMS alert systems actually work, investigating why Tamil translations consistently lag behind Sinhala updates, documenting which communities remain unreached by official communications.
When Ditwah formed, Sri Lankan journalists weren’t watching regional meteorological discourse because they’d never been trained to watch it. They weren’t questioning the Met Department’s communication strategy because they didn’t know what effective disaster communication looks like. They weren’t comparing Sri Lanka’s early warning systems against international frameworks because most had never heard of the Sendai Framework.
This capacity gap means journalism can’t fulfil its basic function during the one time it matters most: before disaster strikes, when scrutiny of early warning systems could actually save lives.
A racism, and language discrimination that killed people
The temporal, and structural failures compounded with something darker.
I studied 68 posts on the Disaster Management Centre’s Facebook page from 25-29 November. Only 12 featured content in Tamil. All 12 concerned flooding. There were zero landslide warnings in Tamil.
Kandy, Badulla, Nuwara Eliya recorded the highest death tolls. These districts have significant Tamil-speaking populations, particularly Malaiyaha Tamil communities in tea estates. The National Building Research Organisation (NBRO) issued detailed landslide evacuation orders for these exact areas. Level 3 red alerts which requires immediate evacuation.
Every single one was published only in Sinhala and English. Tamil speakers in the districts experiencing the worst landslides received no warnings in their language about the specific threat that killed some of them. This wasn’t an oversight. This wasn’t a capacity constraint. This was an institutional decision that Tamil-speaking lives mattered less than the administrative convenience of not translating, and communicating safety information.
I also studied 143 updates from the Met Department’s Facebook page over the same period. Routine temperature data appeared trilingually. Urgent warnings about the developing cyclone were delayed or totally omitted in Tamil. Between the night of 27 November and morning of 28 November, as the storm intensified into Cyclone Ditwah, Sinhala warnings went out at 8.26pm, 11.19pm, 2.02am, 5.48am. Specific coordinates, movement speeds, intensification status.
The last Tamil warning was posted at 5.58pm on 27 November. Tamil speakers got zero updates during the critical 12-hour overnight window as the storm intensified.
I also studied the DMC’s official website. Situation reports on 27, 28, 29 November, containing detailed information about evacuations, road closures, emergency response, were exclusively in Sinhala. Of 34 weather reports published between 25-29 November, one contained Tamil content. Even the DMC’s banner image on Facebook, with critical emergency numbers, remains to this day only in Sinhala.
32 million SMS messages sent to ether?
Here’s where the numbers stop making sense entirely.
The DMC told The New Humanitarian it sent out 32 million text alerts. The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission’s data from June 2025 shows around 27 million SIM registrations in Sri Lanka. Where, and to whom did the DMC send 32 million alerts when only 27 million SIMs exist in Sri Lanka? Did these messages target those in the deep South of the country that wasn’t impacted at all by the cyclone? Did they flood a small demographic, located somewhere in the country, with repeated messages? We may never know.
I didn’t receive any SMS alert. No one I have interviewed since the cyclone hit received one. No friend, family, neighbour or colleague of those I’ve talked with received one. None of the survivors quoted in The New Humanitarian’s reporting received one.
Perhaps the DMC inflated numbers to cover institutional failure or they sent alerts to inactive numbers, and counted them anyway. It may be that their SMS alerting system is fundamentally broken, with alerts shown as sent, but are never actually delivered.
Who knows?
Whether criminal incompetence or through systemic failure, the DMC’s claim appears false.
And this being Sri Lanka, it will never be investigated.
An information vacuum that killed people
When official communications fail, disinformation rushes in to fill the void.
Divya Thotawatte, writing in the Daily FT, documented at least 57 false social media posts linked to Cyclone Ditwah. Claims that entire villages were buried by landslides. That the Kotmale dam had cracked. That the DMC itself had been deactivated. On 30 November, false news went viral claiming the Kotmale dam had breached. Hundreds of residents fled their homes. The DMC’s hotline was completely overwhelmed. Hundreds of calls seeking verification.
Here’s what I told the Daily FT: “The institutional inability to communicate coherently led to and directly created the space for disinformation to flourish.”
In other words, the DMC does not, and cannot recognise that its own catastrophic, and criminal institutional failure led to the accelerated creation of mis, and disinformation.
Slow, uneven, inaccessible official communication created uncertainty on the ground. If there was coherent, regular, official, clear, evidence-based communication including at the last-mile, people would not have been as easily misled. But much of what the DMC and Met Department published was inaccessible to large segments of the population. Communications were predominantly in Sinhala, leaving Tamil-speaking communities uninformed. Disabled communities, including the blind, and deaf, weren’t accommodated either.
This created fertile ground for disinformation.
Chasing after false content after it goes viral will never be enough. Strengthening the fundamentals of official, timely, coherent crisis communication is far more effective in reducing disinformation’s impact.
Military leadership and institutional failure
The trappings of militarisation also warrant examination in the context of disaster-related communication. The DMC is headed by a Major General. It’s military leadership.
From Namini Wijedasa’s investigative journalism in the Sunday Times, to Tharushi Weerasinghe, and Sandran Rubatheesan’s ground reporting in The New Humanitarian, and Ambika Satkunanathan’s comprehensive, and unique capture of the Attorney-General’s 2024 audit report, published on Twitter, all document monumental institutional failures at the DMC.
These failures directly contributed to loss of lives around Cyclone Ditwah, especially amongst Tamil-speaking peoples.
The military leadership of the DMC warrants criminal investigation. But it will never happen.
Here’s the contradiction: public adulation of the military remains focused on the post-Ditwah recovery phase. Humanitarian operations. Rescue efforts. Legitimate, life-saving work, often done very well by soldiers on the ground.
But there’s no interrogation of how the DMC – under military leadership – failed so catastrophically before the cyclone struck. Many see just one side, and even journalists are blind to more critical captures, and robust questions around complicity in preventable deaths.
Criminal culpability and journalism’s failure
I used the phrase “criminal culpability” in my interview with the Daily FT and I meant it. The DMC’s and Met Department’s repeated failings, including their inability and unwillingness to take disaster communications seriously, created the space for public panic and mass displacement. People who were scared, anxious, traumatised, stressed consumed disinformation because official channels had left them uninformed.
Sri Lanka has grappled with the same crisis communication failures since the 2004 Asian tsunami. Twenty-one years. Multiple disasters. Little structural reform.
The spread of disinformation during Ditwah wasn’t primarily a platform failure. It was the result of deep-rooted institutional weaknesses in disaster, and crisis communication. And mainstream journalism has failed to hold these institutions accountable, over two decades.
The function of journalism isn’t just reporting what the state says. It’s scrutinising what the state does, questioning what the state claims, exposing gaps between official statements and lived reality.
When the Met Department Director General says warnings were issued on 12 November, where were the journalists asking: “Show us exactly what those warnings said and where they appeared”? If the DMC claims 32 million text alerts, where are the journalists verifying that against TRC’s data? When Tamil communities in Matale and Badulla say they received no warnings, where are the journalists investigating why the DMC’s Facebook page featured almost no Tamil content during the most critical 72 hours? When the DMC is led by military officers, where are the journalists examining whether that institutional culture contributes to the systematic communication failures documented disaster after disaster?
Natural disasters happen. But the unequal distribution of information, and especially the systematic privileging of Sinhala speakers in access to life-saving warnings is a human failure – or more accurately, the privileging of a language, and community over others, which is essentially racism.
Journalism’s role is exposing all this loudly, repeatedly, until they’re addressed. But mainstream media hasn’t done that.
Digitalisation as discrimination amplifier
Sri Lanka enthusiastically embraces digitalisation of government services. Relatedly, the DMC and Met Department have moved disaster communications onto Facebook, websites, and according to them at least, SMS warning systems.
What Cyclone Ditwah revealed is that digitalisation built on discriminatory foundations simply entrenches racism and makes discrimination faster and more efficient.
The Sri Lankan state has never meaningfully served the basic existential needs of Tamil-speaking communities. Now we’ve digitised that exclusion. Viral Facebook posts that are in Sinhala only. Photographs and weather maps with legends that aren’t in Tamil. Official government websites with Tamil language options displaying everything in Sinhala. SMS systems claiming to reach everyone whilst reaching no one especially in Tamil-speaking areas that are also amongst the most landslide prone in the country.
Earlier this year, I documented similar failures in Sri Lanka’s e-NIC project. Without confronting and dismantling the systemic racism permeating public institutions, any digital infrastructure will simply create a more efficient system of exclusion. Cyclone Ditwah proved that warning correct.
Conclusion
Over 640 lives are already lost to Cyclone Ditwah, and a cost to country that dwarfs the Asian tsunami 20 years ago. These figures will likely grow. We will never know exactly how many deaths could have been prevented through better communication.
But we do know Tamil-speaking communities received systematically less life-saving information, less detailed warnings, and often no warnings at all. We know Tamil speaking peoples died because of this information vacuum.
We know that the DMC and Met Dept reflect the ingrained institutional racism that colours governance frameworks. We know disabled communities were excluded entirely from disaster communications designed for the sighted and hearing. We know the DMC, under military leadership, failed catastrophically. We know the Met Department’s alerting failed catastrophically.
Let me end with what I told The New Humanitarian: “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.”
Unless we fundamentally change how disaster communications work, train journalists to rigorously scrutinise early warning systems as an ongoing beat rather than post-disaster afterthought, hold institutions criminally accountable for discriminatory failures that kill people, and build media oversight mechanisms that function before disasters occur, the next tsunami, flood, landslide or cyclone will claim just as many lives.
