Udaya Gammanpila
Udaya Prabath Gammanpila is a Sri Lankan nationalist politician. By profession, he is a computer engineer, a lawyer and a politician. He is a former Minister of Energy and Member of Sri Lanka Parliament for Colombo District.
He has also worked as the former minister in the Western province and carried out the ministerial portfolio as the government's Cabinet minister for Buddhism and Religious affairs. He was elected as a Member of Parliament with 198,818 preferential votes from the Colombo District at the General Election held on 17 August 2015. He is also the leader of the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya political party.
Early life and education
Udaya Gammanpila was born at Nawalapitiya on 6 February 1970. He attended D. S. Senanayake College, Colombo for his secondary education, where he passed the GCE A/L examination in 1988 and won a scholarship from the Australian government to study for a degree in computer science at Monash University. In 1993, while in his fourth year, he was appointed as an assistant lecturer at the university. Upon his return to Sri Lanka in 1994, he joined the Australia-Lanka Group as an Apprentice Manager and two years later became the Director and CEO of the group. Gammanpila, studied law at the Sri Lanka Law College, passed the law examination in 2003 and was sworn in as a lawyer.Early political life
Gammanpila entered politics in 2000 as a founding member of the Sinhala nationalist political party, Sihala Urumaya. Gammanpila was appointed as the party's propaganda secretary in 2001 and later became its deputy general secretary.In 2007, he was appointed as the chairman of the Central Environmental Authority by the President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Gammanpila also served as a member of the All-Party Representatives Committee appointed by the President to resolve the North-East crisis in August of that year.
In 2009, he voluntarily resigned as chairman of the Central Environmental Authority to contest for the Western Provincial Council. He was elected and sworn in as the Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation, Industries and Environment of the Western Province.