Harsha Wijayawardhana served as the first webmaster of www.lk, Sri Lanka’s original government web portal. This role placed him among the practitioners responsible for establishing the country’s early official presence on the World Wide Web.
“He was the very first web master of www.lk, the Government web portal of Sri Lanka.”
What the public record confirms
The ICT History of Sri Lanka project records the role in both Harsha’s individual pioneer profile and its Index of Pioneers. The individual profile identifies www.lk as the Government web portal and places this work within his contribution to Internet and e-government development from 1996 to 2002. The Index separately lists him as “The first webmaster of www.lk, the Government web portal of Sri Lanka.”
Related government websites
During the same formative period, Harsha developed www.priu.gov.lk for the Policy, Research and Information Unit of the Presidential Secretariat. It subsequently became the official media website of the President of Sri Lanka. He also developed official websites for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including www.formin.gov.lk and later www.mfa.gov.lk, alongside work on the Ministry’s local- and wide-area networks.
Historical significance
Webmaster work at that time extended beyond publishing pages. It required establishing and maintaining a dependable national information service when Sri Lanka’s public Internet infrastructure, institutional publishing procedures and government web presence were still emerging. The www.lk role therefore belongs to the history of both Sri Lankan Internet development and digital government.
In charge of the National Y2K Event Management Centre
On 31 December 1999, Harsha was in charge of Sri Lanka’s National Event Management Centre at the CINTEC office on the 14th floor of the World Trade Center in Colombo. The centre maintained an action plan and checklist linking it in real time with mission-critical systems across electricity and hydropower, civil aviation, banking, health, ports, energy and policing.
The CINTEC history records Harsha contacting the responsible organizations during the midnight rollover and continuing through the checklist when surrounding buildings temporarily lost power. The institutions reported no Y2K failure; the interruption was attributed to overloading. Sri Lanka completed the rollover without a national Y2K incident.
A revealing final incident
After the national systems had passed safely into the year 2000, Harsha left the centre at about 3.00 a.m. At a restaurant in the World Trade Center, his payment had to be handled manually because the restaurant’s cashier system had stopped working. The CINTEC history describes this as the Y2K issue Harsha personally encountered that night.
One connected contribution
The two responsibilities illustrate complementary parts of the same period: www.lk helped establish Sri Lanka’s public presence on the emerging Web, while the National Y2K Event Management Centre protected continuity across the country’s critical computerized services at the century rollover.
Institutional sources: ICT History of Sri Lanka — Harsha Wijayawardhana pioneer profile; ICT History of Sri Lanka — Index of Pioneers; The Apex Body Story – CINTEC, national Y2K account, pp. 78–84. Supporting professional record: Harsha Wijayawardhana professional profile, 2018.