Author: Pramudith D Rupasinghe

For more than a century, the eight-hour workday has been treated as a hard-won labour right rather than a strategic advantage. That framing has cost companies dearly. Evidence from productivity research, occupational health studies, and organisations that have piloted shorter or strictly bounded working weeks points to the same conclusion: when corporations protect the boundary of an 8-hour day, five days a week, they do not lose output; they gain efficiency, retain better talent, and build a more resilient workforce. It is also increasingly understood as an ethical obligation rather than a discretionary perk. This article makes the case for…

Let’s start with an image, because in this part of the world images travel faster than arguments. Picture Jantar Mantar in New Delhi in the last week of July: thousands of young Indians, many of them dressed in cockroach costumes, camped beside an eighteenth-century observatory built to measure the movement of stars, demanding the resignation of a cabinet minister over a leaked exam paper. Now hold that image next to three others from the same neighbourhood in the last three years: Sheikh Hasina fleeing Dhaka by helicopter as a mob stormed her palace; Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s swimming pool in Colombo filled…

In the early hours of July 6 this year, while most of Ukhiya in Cox’s Bazar of Bangladesh slept, the hillsides of Camps 7, 11 and 15 gave way. Eight people died beneath the mud—among them a seven-year-old boy, a married couple with their four-year-old son, and a woman buried alongside three children aged thirteen, five and three. Two days later, another slope collapsed onto a madrasa during classes, killing at least five children while they were attending lessons. The Bangladesh Meteorological Department, with the weary precision of an institution that has issued this forecast many times before, predicted more…