# Harini Amarasuriya

Harini Nireka Amarasuriya (born 6 March 1970) is a Sri Lankan sociologist, academic, activist, and politician serving as the 16th Prime Minister of Sri Lanka since 2024.
Having spent a decade as an academic at the Open University of Sri Lanka, where she was engaged with the Federation of University Teachers' Association in trade union action; Amarasuriya was nominated by the National People's Power (NPP) party as its National List Member of Parliament in 2020.
She was appointed as the 16th Prime Minister of Sri Lanka in September 2024, concurrently appointed as the interim minister of justice, health, women, education, trade, and industries in the first Dissanayake cabinet. She is the third woman to hold the office of prime minister of Sri Lanka, after Sirimavo Bandaranaike and her daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga. Amarasuriya was reappointed as the 17th Prime Minister following the NPP's landslide victory in the 2024 Sri Lankan parliamentary election, in which she received 655,289 votes—the second-highest ever obtained by a candidate in Sri Lanka's parliamentary electoral history.

## Early life and education

Born in Galle on 6 March 1970, her father was a planter and her mother a housewife, Amarasuriya was the youngest of three. She is a relative of H. W. Amarasuriya, Cabinet Minister for Trade and Commerce from 1948 to 1952. The family moved to Colombo after her father's estate was taken over by the government under the Land Reform Act of 1972, where she attended Bishop's College, with a year in the United States as an exchange student.
Amarasuriya gained an Indian government scholarship to read Sociology at the Hindu College, from 1991 to 1994, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts honours degree in sociology from the University of Delhi. Her contemporaries at Hindu College included Imtiaz Ali and Arnab Goswami. Following her return from India, she worked as a community health worker with Nest Sri Lanka, working with tsunami-affected children. Five years later she gained a Master of Arts in Applied and Development Anthropology from Macquarie University, followed by a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh and Queen Margaret University.

## Academic and activist

She joined the Open University of Sri Lanka as a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences in 2011 after completing her PhD, where she later became the head of the department. Amarasuriya has undertaken research into Human Rights and Ethics in Sri Lanka funded by the European Research Council and the influence of radical Christians on dissent in Sri Lanka funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Edinburgh.

### Trade union action

Becoming a member of the Federation of University Teachers' Association (FUTA), she took part in trade union action demanding better working conditions and fair treatment for university staff.

### 6% of GDP for education

Amarasuriya has been an advocate for educational reforms to truly enable free education as envisioned by C. W. W. Kannangara when free education was introduced in Sri Lanka in 1938. She has called for the equal access to quality education independent of the economic power of the people thus ensuring equal education opportunities for everyone, by which to stop the concept of popular schools in Sri Lanka. On this note, Amarasuriya campaigned with the FUTA in 2011 and 2012 for government allocation of 6% of the GDP for education. In 2023, Sri Lanka had only allocated 2% of its GDP for education.

## Political career
### Member of Parliament

Amarasuriya joined the National Intellectuals Organization in 2019 and campaigned for the NPP Candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake during the 2019 Sri Lankan presidential election. On 12 August 2020, she was nominated and appointed by the NPP as the national list candidate to enter the 16th Parliament of Sri Lanka following the 2020 Sri Lankan parliamentary election.
Confusion and concerns were raised about whether she could continue her service as an academic senior lecturer at the Open University after being nominated as a national list candidate. However, in an interview with EconomyNext, she officially revealed that she had resigned from the position of senior lecturer of the Open University in order to pursue her political career and parliamentary politics as an MP.
She focused on reconciliation and social inclusion to help bridge ethnic, religious and political divides in Sri Lanka, as well as promoting national unity and stability. Additionally, she advocated for gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights, was involved in the Parliamentary Caucus for Animal Welfare, and served on the Board of Directors for the non-governmental organization Nest.

### Premiership (2024–present)

   “Well, we don’t have experience in making the country bankrupt for sure, but we will get experience in building the country,”
On 24 September 2024, Amarasuriya was sworn in as the Sixteenth (16th) Prime Minister of Sri Lanka by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. She is the first prime minister of her party, and the third woman to hold the role after Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Chandrika Kumaratunga.
Since the NPP had only two members left in parliament following Dissanayake's ascent to the Presidency, his first cabinet consisted of only three members, including himself and Amarasuriya. Amarasuriya was given the portfolios of Justice, Public Administration, Provincial Councils, Local Government and Labour, Education, Science and Technology, Trade, Commercial, Food Security, Co-operative Development, Industries and Entrepreneur Development, Women, Child and Youth Affairs and Sports and Health in the caretaker government until a new parliament is elected in the parliamentary election on 14 November 2024.

#### Educational reforms

Following her appointment as Minister of Education, Amarasuriya initiated educational reforms with the halting of the longstanding practice of inviting politicians to school functions by school administrators, to remove the political influence from schools.

#### 2024 parliamentary election

Amarasuriya who is the Deputy Secretary of the NPP lead the NPP nominations from Colombo District for the 2024 Sri Lankan parliamentary election.
Amarasuriya set a new record by securing the highest preferential votes from Colombo District with 655,289 votes. She surpassed the preferential vote count of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who contested from Kurunegala District in 2020 and gained 527,364 votes, but in the same election Vijitha Herath set a new record with 716,715 votes in Gampaha District.
Following the parliamentary election, Amarasuriya was re-appointed as the seventeenth (17th) Prime Minister of Sri Lanka. She was also appointed as the Minister of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education.

## Electoral history

Electoral history of Harini Amarasuriya :
| Election | Constituency | Party | Party | Votes | Result | Ref |
| 2024 parliamentary | Colombo District | | National People's Power | 655,289 | Elected | |

## Personal life

Amarasuriya is unmarried, and has no children.

## Honours

In October 2024, the Postal Department issued a personalized stamp of Prime Minister Amarasuriya. The incident caused some controversy.

## Works

* Amarasuriya, Harini; Kelly, Tobias; Maunaguru, Sidharthan; Oustinova-Stjepanovic, Galina; Spencer, Jonathan (1 September 2020). The Intimate Life of Dissent: Anthropological Perspectives. UCL Press. ISBN 978-1-78735-777-8.