FROM DIGITAL DIVIDE TO DIGITAL SKY

How a Vision for Equal Education Led Singer to Starlink. Big moves rarely begin with hardware.They begin with a problem.

For Dhammika Perera, the problem was blunt: opportunity in Sri Lanka was not evenly distributed. A child in Colombo could access elite schooling, specialist teachers, English immersion, digital tools. A child in a rural outpost often could not.

The divide was not about talent. It was about access. That gap led to DP Education — a nationwide free digital learning platform spanning school curricula, spoken English, advanced subjects and exam preparation. Ambitious. Scalable. Free.

But ambition ran into infrastructure.

You cannot stream education without signal. You cannot democratise learning without bandwidth.The digital divide in Sri Lanka was as wide as the educational divide itself.

That is where instruction became action.

Perera tasked Singer Sri Lanka PLC to find a solution. Not incremental improvement. Not another urban-centric rollout. A structural answer. He asked Chairman Mohan Pandithage and Singer’s Managing Director Mahesh Wijewardene to look outward — globally — and negotiate where necessary. Perera, ever watchful and up to date on tech, pointed the way towards Starlink. The brief was clear: Find a way to connect the unconnected.

infrastructure-light,

geographically

That is not villainy. It is conditioning.

Yet conditioning can impede progress. Private-sector leaders who cross over into national service bring urgency. They understand that capital is impatient. That opportunity windows close. That execution matters more than circulars. When they begin to exit, one must ask whether the environment allows them to execute — or merely to advise.

Is political interference creeping in? Is caution being misread as obstruction? Are good ideas dying quietly in meeting rooms? Or is there another explanation — burnout, misalignment, or simply the difficulty of reforming systems older than the reformers?

Satellite-based, infrastructure-light, geographically indifferent. A system designed to bypass trenches, cables, and urban concentration. Starlink was the answer.

For rural Sri Lanka, this was not marketing gloss. It was possibility.

Starlink offers:

High-speed broadband via satellite — no dependency on fibre rollouts.
Coverage in remote areas — estates, fishing villages, interior provinces.

Rapid installation — plug, align, connect.
Business and educational continuity — resilient during terrestrial outages.
Scalable reach — national coverage without waiting for physical build-out.

The question then became commercial.

Who would distribute it?
Who would service it?
Who would finance access for households outside Colombo?

Singer was the natural conduit.

With its islandwide branch network, consumer financing expertise, after-sales infrastructure and a database of loyal customers built over decades, it possessed something rare: reach plus trust.

Starlink needed scale. Singer offered it.

But the story is not about signing ceremonies.

It is about delegation.

Dhammika Perera set the vision — equalise educational access.
He placed operational confidence in Mohan Pandithage and Mahesh Wijewardene to execute.

Pandithage, who began his career at Hayleys PLC as an 18-year-old and rose through discipline rather than inheritance, understands long arcs. He has seen industries evolve, conglomerates diversify, crises reshape markets.

Wijewardene brings operational sharpness — retail scale, execution muscle, customer alignment.

Between vision and execution lies credibility.

Sri Lanka’s recovery conversation often centres on debt and deficits. Yet infrastructure equity — particularly digital infrastructure — may prove equally decisive. Education without connectivity is aspiration. Connectivity without distribution is theory.

Singer’s engagement with Starlink closes a loop that began not in a boardroom — but in a classroom gap.

The digital sky is not a metaphor anymore. It is a tool.

And whether it narrows inequality will depend not on headlines — but on how effectively it reaches the last mile.