To turn off the lights in its streets so as to save electricity Sri Lanka has decided, as the country’s minister said today. THE Sri Lanka is experiencing its worst financial crisis in decades, which has brought new power outages and gloom in its stock market, leading to a suspension of trading due to the dip in prices.
The island nation of 22 million people is struggling with power outages lasting up to 13 hours a day as the government is unable to make payments for fuel imports due to a lack of foreign exchange.
«“We have already instructed officials to turn off streetlights across the country in order to save energy.” pointed out the Minister of Energy Pavitra Guanyaraci speaking to journalists as broadcast by the Athens News Agency.
A diesel shipment from neighboring India is expected to arrive on Saturday as part of a $ 500 million credit line, the minister said, but warned that the situation was not expected to improve immediately.
“Once this is done we will be able to reduce the downtime but until it rains, probably sometime in May, the power outages will have to continue,” Guanyaracci told reporters. “There is nothing else we can do” he added.
Water levels in reservoirs supplying hydropower plants have fallen to record lows, while demand has risen to record lows during the hot and dry season, she said.
The Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) reduced the duration of daily trading to two hours, from the normal four and a half, due to power outages for the rest of the week at the request of stockbrokers, as stated in a statement.
Dive into the shares
However, the shares plunged after the start of today’s trading and the CSE suspended trading for 30 minutes – for the third time in two days – after the index including the largest companies fell more than 5%. The CSE suspended trading twice yesterday as concerns about the economy and power outages intensified.
The crisis is the result of tax cuts made at the wrong time and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic combined with historically weak public finances, which have resulted in a 70% drop in the country’s foreign exchange reserves over the past two years.
Source: News Beast
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