WORLD NEWS | Sri Lanka thanks Indian govt for serving Jaffna cultural center: Northern Province governor

Jaffa [Sri Lanka]Feb 11 (ANI): Sri Lanka’s Northern Province Governor Jeevan Thiagarajah said on Saturday that Sri Lanka is grateful to the government and people of India for their services at the Jaffna Cultural Centre.

“We thank the government and people of India for this donation. It extends and connects with the art world,” Thiagarajah said at an event commemorating the dedication of the Jaffna Cultural Center to the people of Sri Lanka.

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Built with a grant from the Government of India, the center will be a symbol of the growing bilateral and developmental relationship between New Delhi and Colombo.

The event was also attended by Union Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting (MoS) L Murugan, who is on a four-day visit to Sri Lanka from February 9-12.

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In his speech, the Governor said that the Jaffna Cultural Center is associated with Sri Lanka’s rich regional history, which celebrates arts, faith and culture. “We have a lot of architectural work from many cultures in the region,” he said.

“The government is currently designing a visa system for people of Sri Lankan origin abroad to allow seamless and continuous access and presence. The region has been influenced by a variety of overseas cultures. Spiritual connections cannot be mistaken,” the governor said.

He said Sri Lankans went to India to collect taxes in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Karnataka and Telangana for market access opportunities.

Adjacent to the iconic Jaffna Public Library, the Jaffna Cultural Center will be the tallest building in the town of Jaffna. Conceived as a reconciliation project, the center primarily aims to expand the cultural infrastructure for the people of the northern provinces, helping them reconnect with their cultural roots as well as the rest of the country, while revitalizing Jaffna’s ancient cultural heritage.

The center is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, including a two-story museum; a state-of-the-art theater-style auditorium that seats over 600 people, a single-story learning tower, a public plaza that also doubles as an amphitheatre, and more.

It also has a temporary exhibition hall (air-conditioned), an open exhibition hall, a gift shop, museum shop and workshops, a 100-seat conference facility, a cafeteria, a multimedia library, lecture rooms, workshops and gallery space.

The Memorandum of Understanding for the construction of the Jaffna Center was signed on 9 June 2014. Once construction is complete, the facility will be almost completed during the visit of Foreign Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar to Colombo in March 2022. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)