TELO Leader Adaikalanathan Expresses Doubts About the National People’s Power (NPP)

The announcement by the Democratic Tamil National Alliance come as Selvam Adaikalanathan, head of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Movement (TELO) and a former parliamentarian, raised doubts about the National People’s Power (NPP) addressing the ethnic issues faced by Eelam Tamils. Speaking at a media briefing in Mannar, he confirmed that TELO will contest in all districts of the North-East, including Amparai and Trincomalee under the Democratic Tamil National Alliance.

While acknowledging the NPP’s support in the South, Adaikalanathan questioned whether the NPP government would take meaningful steps to solve the ethnic problem or halt ongoing land grabs in Tamil areas. “Will the NPP government do anything? I am not so sure,” he remarked, reflecting widespread skepticism in Tamil political circles.

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Senathirajah resigns as ITAK leader

Mavai Senathiraja has stepped down as leader of ITAK and invited Sivagnanam Sritharan to take over.

Sritharan was elected to the position at the party’s 17th national convention on 21 January this year.

In a letter to him, Senathiraja noted he was yet to take up the responsibility, adding that he resigned from the position effective from 07 October.

Jaishankar’s visit was crucial in ending debt restructuring – Minister

Sri Lanka on Tuesday said the recent visit by Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar was important in ending its debt restructuring with international sovereign bond holders.

Jaishankar, who made a day-long trip to Sri Lanka on October 4, became the first foreign dignitary to visit the island nation after Anura Kumara Dissanayake assumed office as the new president on September 23.

Cabinet spokesman and foreign affairs minister Vijitha Herath told reporters here that India’s signing up for the agreement as a bilateral creditor endorsing that the agreement was compatible with the comparative treatment principle in debt restructuring.

Ahead of the presidential polls last month, cash-strapped Sri Lanka had on September 19 announced that it had reached an in principle agreement with the external commercial creditors for the restructuring of approximately USD 17.5 billion of external commercial debts.

Sri Lanka declared its first-ever sovereign default in mid-April 2022, having run out of its foreign exchange reserves, the first since gaining independence from Britain in 1948.

The halt to the debt services meant that the multilateral creditor nations and commercial lenders could not extend fresh financing to the country.

In July this year, the Sri Lankan government reached a debt restructuring deal with international sovereign bondholders after protracted negotiations with countries such as China, India, France and Japan.

Sri Lanka is currently in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the next tranche of the USD 2.9 billion bailout package for which the IMF has made external debt restructuring conditional.

The third tranche of the bailout package was released in mid-June as the Washington-headquartered global lender said on August 2 that Sri Lanka’s economic reform programme has yielded good results.

Herath said the bond holders had asked for agreement from bilateral creditors on the aspect of comparative treatment of debt.

Meanwhile, asked if Indian projects in Sri Lanka, including the Adani investment projects, had been discussed with Jaishankar, Herath said since the current government is a transitional government the next parliamentary election is due in November such matters were not discussed.

The ruling National People’s Power (NPP), in the run up to the September 21 election, had said they would annul the Adani wind power project in the southeastern region.

Herath said the government needs to weigh the pros and cons of the Adani wind project.

The dispute was about the high cost per unit of power and the issue was raised in court. We shall review all matters connected after the next government is formed, Herath said.

Source: PTI

US committed to Sri Lanka’s economic development, Biden writes to AKD

US President Joe Biden has written to Sri Lanka President Anura Kumar Dissanayake calling for enhanced cooperation between the two countries in promoting economic growth, regional security and democratic governance.

The President’s Media Division (PMD) in Colombo said on Tuesday October 08 that Biden had written to Dissanayake to congratulate him on his recent election victory. The PMD called Biden’s letter a “significant gesture of diplomatic goodwill”.

In a separate statement, the PMD said the US has also committed to providing essential support to strengthen Sri Lanka’s economy. According to the PMD, US Ambassador Julie Chung has said in a meeting on Tuesday that support would be focused on fostering an export-driven economy in the island nation.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are prepared to offer financial support to help enhance the economic prospects of Sri Lanka, the statement quoted Chung as saying.

The US has pledged both financial and technical support for President Dissanayake’s initiatives aimed at preventing fraud and corruption and has also expressed its commitment to assisting efforts for good governance and ensuring the security of Sri Lanka whenever needed, the PMD said.

The US also supports the new president’s programmes focused on developing renewable energy, fostering an export-oriented agricultural industry, and alleviating rural poverty, the statement added, noting that an ongoing initiative to provide lunches for rural schools will be expanded to include urban schools in the future.

The president’s office said Biden’s message recognised the “importance of the peaceful and democratic nature of the election, which reaffirmed the strength of Sri Lanka’s democratic institutions”.

“This election reflects the strength of Sri Lanka’s democratic institutions and the commitment of its citizens to shaping their future through free and fair elections conducted in a peaceful manner, a cornerstone of any democracy,” Biden was quoted as saying.

In his letter, the US president has emphasised the shared values between the two nations, particularly in advancing stability, prosperity, and inclusivity for all Sri Lankan citizens and also expressed optimism about strengthening bilateral ties under President Dissanayake’s leadership, highlighting cooperation in several key areas.

“The United States shares your vision of a more equitable Sri Lanka that is stable, prosperous, and inclusive of all its citizens,” Biden has said, expressing his commitment to working with President Dissanayake to “further enhance cooperation between the two nations, particularly in promoting inclusive economic growth, regional security, and democratic governance”.

“This message marks a new chapter in U.S.-Sri Lanka relations, with both countries poised to collaborate on initiatives that will benefit the region and uphold democratic principles,” the PMD said in its statement.

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Sri Lanka’s new government pledges review of Adani wind project

Sri Lanka’s new government said it will review a wind power deal with the Adani Group, throwing a fresh hurdle for the Indian conglomerate as it seeks to expand abroad.

The previous administration’s approval of electricity prices for Adani Green Energy Ltd.’s projects “was a problem,” Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath told reporters after a meeting of the Cabinet ministers on Tuesday. The new government would give the deal a fresh look after parliamentary elections are held Nov. 14, he said.

The move to reassess the Adani Green deal follows through on a campaign pledge by newly elected president Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who was swept into office last month after a closely contested three-way race. Dissanayake had called the project a threat to Sri Lanka’s energy sovereignty and vowed to cancel it.

Herath on Tuesday said no policy decisions on major projects would be taken before the parliamentary poll. Despite Dissanayake’s victory, his bloc only had three seats in Sri Lanka’s 225-seat legislature.

Any challenge to the deal would be a blow to Gautam Adani’s ambitions, as the group led by Asia’s second-richest person looks to develop multiple infrastructure projects in the island nation. Projects in the works include expansion of the Colombo container-ship port backed by the US Development Finance Corp.

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Sri Lanka to seek BRICS membership at upcoming summit in Russia

Sri Lanka will pursue BRICS membership at a meeting in Russia later this month, cabinet spokesman Vijitha Herath told media on Tuesday.

Herath said that Russia will host the BRICS Summit in Kazan from Oct. 22 to Oct. 24, 2024.

Although President Anura Kumara Dissanayake was invited to attend the summit, he will be unable to participate due to domestic commitments, Herath explained.

The country’s secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, along with a team of officials, will represent Sri Lanka at the summit, where the country will formally seek BRICS membership, Herath said.

Sri Lanka plans to reach out to the foreign ministers of all BRICS nations for support soon, Herath said.

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Just as people in the south have begun to reject traditional political parties and leaders, a rejection is also needed in the north and east By Veeragathy Thanabalasingham

Sri Lankan political parties have been forced to prepare for the Parliamentary Elections before the exhaustion of campaigning for the Presidential Election has worn off. Particularly, the parties of the losers among the main presidential candidates have to face a national election again before they can recover from the impact of the defeat.

The new President, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, dissolved Parliament a day after taking office and called a General Election, as he had promised the people during the election campaign. The process of accepting nominations, which began last Friday (4), will be completed next Friday (11). The election will be held on 14 November.

President Dissanayake will ask the people who elected him as President to give him a resounding victory at the Parliamentary Elections to form a strong National People’s Power (NPP) government to facilitate the firm continuation of his rule.

There are those who, judging by how the people voted at the Presidential Election, predict that it will be impossible for the NPP to gain an absolute majority in Parliament. The votes of the three main candidates in the Northern and Eastern Provinces will not be available to their parties at the Parliamentary Elections, so these estimates are not very accurate. Also, the same factors do not fully influence both national polls.

A vote for change

Although President Dissanayake did not win 50% of the vote, the people voted for him for a change. The people who identified Dissanayake as the candidate for change and made him victorious will certainly expect him to form a stable government and give him enough support to fulfil his promises.

At Parliamentary Elections, people usually vote for the party that wins the Presidential Election to form the government. This time, the chances of the NPP getting more votes at the Parliamentary Elections than it got at the Presidential Election are higher in the backdrop of the people’s strong dislike for the parties that represent the traditional political elite.

It was widely believed that it would be impossible for Dissanayake, who received 3.16% of the vote at the 2019 Presidential Election, to make a giant leap to 50% to win the Presidential Election this time. But Dissanayake, who said that politics was not mathematics but social science, remained a firm believer in his victory based on the growing support for the NPP in the country at large.

It is no exaggeration to say that no previous political leader in Sri Lanka has achieved what President Dissanayake did two weeks ago. Some observers even describe his victory within five years as unprecedented, not only in Sri Lanka but also in other parts of the world, with a 14-fold jump in the percentage of votes he received at the previous Presidential Election.

A new political landscape

President Dissanayake is also credited with showing that a Left-wing party can win the election without the old vehicle of the United Front. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) could only form coalition governments with Leftist parties against the United National Party (UNP), which was the single largest party in the last century. The old Left-wing parties usually relied on alliances to gain parliamentary representation.

It is a milestone in Sri Lankan politics that today the NPP has become a force that can stand alone and win elections when all those Leftist parties have become history. There can be different opinions about the policies of the NPP; that’s a different thing. Here the focus is only on its electoral performance.

It is no longer appropriate to call the UNP, the SLFP, or the Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) the main parties. They are not likely to have a significant impact on the country’s politics in the current scenario. Gone are the days when other parties came in search of these parties to form alliances; now leaders of these ‘main parties’ are running in search of other parties. However, no other party is ready to ally with them.

Today we are witnessing a new political landscape with the NPP as the ruling party and the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) led by Sajith Premadasa as the main Opposition party.

Alliances and exits

Immediately after the announcement of Parliamentary Elections, former President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP called for an alliance with the SJB. But Premadasa declined the invitation. Some leaders of the SJB claimed that they were ready to take over the UNP under Premadasa if Wickremesinghe stepped down as its Leader.

Although Wickremesinghe has announced that he will no longer contest elections, he cannot be expected to relinquish the leadership of the party any time soon. It seems that the leaders of the SJB put forward a condition that he could not agree to in order to avoid an alliance with the UNP.

Former Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena, the Leader of the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP), and a few others have decided to contest the Parliamentary Elections under a different symbol and with the People’s United Freedom Alliance (PUFA) as their party, even though a group of politicians who earlier belonged to some parties, including the SLPP, which supported Wickremesinghe at the Presidential Election, have said that they will contest the Parliamentary Elections under the ‘gas cylinder’ symbol. Eventually, the UNP and other groups will have to contest under this symbol.

Those who deserted the Rajapaksas and joined Wickremesinghe could not get him a substantial number of votes at the Presidential Election. The election results clearly showed that just as the Rajapaksas had lost their support among the people, those who were with them earlier were also despised by the people.

Meanwhile, some former ministers have decided not to contest the Parliamentary Elections. UNP Deputy Leader Ruwan Wijewardene and Assistant Leader Akila Viraj Kariyawasam also did not want to contest the election. All of them were only hoping for Wickremesinghe’s victory at the Presidential Election for their political prospects. When he failed, their hopes were shattered.
In the NPP’s favour

The disarray within the Opposition creates a more favourable political situation for the NPP than before. President Dissanayake seems to have stumped the Opposition parties by announcing Parliamentary Elections in a short time.

Therefore, this time the people have got a wonderful opportunity to elect people to Parliament who are concerned about maintaining cleanliness in public life and giving priority to the interests of the people. All the political parties that were in power are full of corrupt politicians. Those parties can’t exclude the majority of them and appoint completely new candidates.

The NPP will certainly be keen on fielding young candidates with good education and concern for the interests of the people. It has no difficulty in identifying such new candidates as it has not been in power so far. The other parties may also be forced to field new faces, but the NPP is in a much more advantageous position in this regard than other parties.

In general, people see politicians as a group of unscrupulous people. No one will ever forget that during the popular uprising two years ago, people not only demanded that the Rajapaksas and those with them go home, but also that the 225 Members of Parliament (MPs) should do the same.

Politics today is an easy way to accumulate wealth in a very short period of time. The people can certainly use the upcoming Parliamentary Elections as a step towards changing that ugly political culture.

Tamil politics

Meanwhile, the Tamil political parties in the north and east continue to divide while talking loudly about the unity of the Tamil people. There is no discipline within any party. Tamil people are confused as to who is talking about the real stand of the parties.

Hardly two weeks have passed after the Presidential Election and contradictions have already emerged within the so-called civil society-cum-political formation, the Tamil National Common Structure, which fielded the Tamil common presidential candidate to convey the current political stand of the Sri Lankan Tamils to the south and the international community
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Some groups and money bags among the Tamil diaspora community are corrupting the politics of the north and east in a perverse desire to control Sri Lankan Tamil politics.

There is a danger that the north and east Tamil people may not have a solid representation in the next Parliament. People are bitterly disgusted with Tamil politicians who are simply chanting ultra-nationalist slogans without adopting any concrete approach or time-befitting strategy.

Just as people in the south have begun to reject traditional political parties and leaders, a rejection is also needed in the north and east.

It is no secret that a section of the Tamil population has started thinking about voting for NPP candidates at the Parliamentary Elections as a change.

Courtesy:The Morning

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India’s ‘contract with the community’ comes thru during Jaishankar’s visit By N Sathiya Moorthy

Shorn of frills, Indian External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar’s maiden meeting with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, AKD, after Sri Lanka elected him to the high office last month, is all about re-energising crucial bilateral ties through renewed focus on jobs and revenue. Over the past one-plus-decades, the nation had lost out on both, thanks to the ‘jobless growth’ that had marked years of Chinese funding ‘white elephant’ projects that neither created jobs, nor family incomes, nor revenue for the government in scales that had marked the credit element in bilateral deals.

Jaishankar is the first foreign dignitary to meet President Dissanayake and his compact, two-member team after they took over and familiarised themselves in the new environment, responsibilities and commitments that were considered alien to their political ideology and electoral popularity. Going by what they had said during what should be considered a two-year-long presidential poll campaign since the Aragalaya mass-protests in 2022, it was becoming increasingly clear that Team AKD was serious about the business of governance, and had begun learning the ropes even before the latter became actually available to them.

Yet, the transition would not be easy for President Dissanayake, Prime Minister Harini Amarasooriya and Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath as they begin practising the theoretical briefings that might have learnt from domain experts while in the Opposition and put them into practice once in office. It will be more so if their JVP-NPP obtains the required majority in Parliament in elections that the new President has ordered for 14 November, as very few among them will have even limited parliamentary practice.

Past cohabitations

Should they fail to obtain a parliamentary majority, then it will be a ‘cohabitation government’ of some form. Sri Lanka’s two past experiences in recent times failed after the common element in Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe (later President, 2022-04) provoked the President of the day enough. Of the two, President Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga (CBK) and PM Wickremesinghe belonged to two ideologically opposite political parties, namely the SLFP and the one-time parent UNP. Both political and personality differences had been built into the ‘cohabitation’ from day one.

That was not the case when Wickremesinghe assumed prime ministership under President Maithripala Sirisena (2015-19). Sirisena is his own choice and he and his undivided UNP of the time had made Sirisena’s presidential poll campaign against two-term incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa their own, and offered him the high office, as if on a platter. In the first case, President CBK dismissed the government and ordered fresh elections in 2004.

In the case of Sirisena, the cohabitation government headed by him had amended the Constitution to limit the President’s powers to dissolve Parliament and order fresh elections, from one year after the completion of the current term to six months before the completion of that term. Confused and confounded as he was by the smarter-than-thou attitude of an elitist and sophisticated Prime Minister, Sirisena chose not to exercise the presidential prerogative available to him when due.

By then he too had become more unpopular than his Prime Minister despite getting a mandate of a life-time for both. The rest is all history, leading up to the present, making a blue-blooded Marxist in Dissanayake President in a nation that is anything but Marxist. Right, liberal, the nation was, yes, under the UNP, Sri Lanka’s GoP. Socialist and yet democratic, the government was when the nation swung to the other end of the politico-ideological pendulum.

Re-adjustment time

Never in the past had Sri Lanka thought of a day when it would vote in a Marxist President, whose party had blood-stains and martyrdom in its hands at the same time. Both are products of the twin militant insurgencies the party had heralded in the early seventies and late eighties, and yet chose the democratic path in the intervening years, when JVP founder Rohana Wijeweera actually contested the maiden election for the Executive President in 1982, democratically, and came a distant third.

Critics of the JVP would thus have to read their contemporary history of Sri Lanka one more time before passing value judgements. In context, the readjustment with a Marxist President is not only for the latter and his ideological clan. Instead, Sri Lanka as a nation too has to make those adjustments, and learnt to do it, or re-do their electoral choice five years hence, independent of the incumbent government having a supportive Parliament for five years from November 2024.

All of it means that friends and neighbours of Sri Lanka should continue to have a lot more of patience, perseverance and commitment to the people and the nation, to see through five years that are not going to be easy for the nation and its rulers. India has understood it and has been cautious throughout the twin-elections just at present. Of course, this is going to be followed by long-delayed elections to the nine Provincial Councils, in whose creation New Delhi had played its part through the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987.

Then there are the nation-wide local government elections that the predecessor Wickremesinghe government had shied away from facing, for fear of losing as they did in the presidential poll. This, they did, by committing a contempt of the nation’s Supreme Court, which had upheld the Election Commission’s notification to conduct those polls forthwith. Whatever the outcome of the parliamentary polls, which the JVP-NPP strategists hope to win on the strength of the ‘support and sympathy wave’ felt in the presidential poll, they would still be keen on early elections to lower-level politico-administrative set-ups.

The reasons are not far to seek. One, those elections (alone) would introduce an element of a smooth transition from top to bottom without frequent ideological and personality clashes, this one, bottom-to-top, instead. Two and equally important, now is the time for the JVP-NPP as a political party with continuing electoral ambitions, to take deeper grass-roots all across the country, going beyond the traditional three per cent vote-bank.

The party should realise that the 40-extra per cent vote-share that came AKD’s way in the presidential poll was not theirs. In fact, it could have belonged to the Rajapaksas, especially the clan chieftain and two-term President Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose socialist ideologies too met the JVP’s Marxist background somewhere in between. Or, at least that is a simple interpretation of the poll results, wherein Mahinda’s son Namal Rajapaksa, contesting the presidential poll, drew a pathetic blank.

Commitment to people

It is in this overall background, the India-Sri Lanka neighbourhood relations have to be primed and posited. As Minister Jaishankar and other Indian diplomats, including then foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla, kept reiterating during the long run-up to Argalaya protests and afterwards, India’s commitment is to the people of Sri Lanka. New Delhi’s commitment was tested and certified, though not officially by any stake-holder, that India was playing neutral in the presidential poll, unlike the US and some other western nations and entities like the EU, who were constantly telling the Sri Lankan voters, as to what was expected of them.

The EU was relatively diplomatically, to the point of not being able to communicative enough for the man on the street to catch on. The US, on the other hand, was as abrasive as ever. Both should remember that this will not take them anywhere vis a vis the Sri Lankan people, and hence with the Sri Lankan government, which will be under groundswell pressure, if sought to be bent too much, too fast, and too early.

In these past months after Aragalaya in particular, India has been walking that extra mile or two to prove the point that it would continue to work with the leader and government that the people of Sri Lanka elected. So much so, the customary talk of India influencing Tamil voter decision, deriving from past contacts and commitments, too, was conspicuous by its absence in these times of twin-elections.

India’s contract is with the country, the community and the people, not individual governments and individualistic leaderships that however will require some tweaking but not wholesale re-doing. Hence, universal Sri Lankan concerns of job-creation and revenue-generation are also on the top of India’s agenda for the southern neighbours and each one of the other nations in the South Asian neighbourhood.

White, yellow angels

It is with the full realisation that none of them can be independent economic entities without external inputs in the form of aid, assistance and investments, the last being the most meaningful route to job-creation and revenue-generation, which go beyond the immediate. It is here India as a nation differs from China, which is interested in indebting nations forever and the US, which does the same thing in style and with sophistication.

Through all these processes, the AKD regime seems to have acknowledged that no nation and no investor other than those from the northern neighbour has put in their monies in big-ticket investments in Sri Lanka where white and yellow angels fear to tread. The fact still remains that it is the ‘brown pearl’ continues to prove its worth, time and again.

It is in this context that the Sri Lankan President possibly referred to ‘exporting’ green energy to India. There cannot be such exports without generated green energy in the first place. Looked in context, it is a continuation of past commitments for Sri Lanka to sell energy to India since the post-war era, consolidated into specific projects during the pre-and-post Aragalaya period, involving big-ticket energy investments in the North and the East, including those by India’s private sector Adani Group.

The icing on the cake of course was the high-cost restoration of the Second World War oil tanks farms in eastern Trincomalee, which too could go on to boost energy-related export earnings for the country. These in turn are aimed at finding a permanent solution to dollar-shortage that rocked the country two years back, leading all the way up to Aragalaya and consequent regime-change.

Insidious efforts

Interpreting and intimidating Indian investments and investors through public protests and court cases may be on somebody else’s agenda for India-Sri Lanka relations, but it cannot be so in Sri Lanka’s agenda for Sri Lanka, and Sri Lanka-India relations. Such insidious efforts that had belonged to the socialist era in economic times and the liberal, capitalist times otherwise can only push the nation back to the pre-Aragalaya period of darkness and fear of the unknown.

If nothing else, New Delhi’s approach to other India-centric aspects of bilateral relations as highlighted during Jaishankar’s visit needs to be understood in a new and better perspective. On the one-time high-impact ethnic issue, Jaishankar reiterated the post-war Indian support for the ‘aspirations of all communities, including Tamils, for equality, justice, dignity, peace while maintaining the unity, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Sri Lanka’. It was also a polite, dignified and diplomatic way of acknowledging the deteriorating rights conditions long after the successful conclusion of the ethnic war.

Of course, the bilateral fishermen dispute continues to remain a thorn in the flesh for both governments, but finding a solution to the vexatious problem is not as easier as it seems difficult. There may have to be continuous engagement at the bilateral level, where there will have to be continuous high-level engagements for a time. A conducive atmosphere for this can be created only when the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) suspends its operations against the Indian fishers in Sri Lankan water for an indefinite period – and which as the Head of Government and Supreme Commander, President Dissanayake can and should initiate within his government and within his nation.

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)

Deadline for Postal Vote Applications Ends Tonight

The deadline for submitting postal vote applications for the upcoming parliamentary elections will end at midnight tonight.

The process of accepting postal vote applications began on the 1st of this month.

The Commissioner General of Elections, Saman Sri Ratnayake, stated that government employees who have not yet submitted their postal vote applications must ensure their applications, certified by their respective heads of departments, are handed over to the Returning Officer of their residential district by the end of today.

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Sri Lanka inks US$200mn World Bank loan for budget support

Sri Lanka has signed an agreement for a 200 million dollar budget support loan with the World Bank linked to economic reforms in debt management, banking and female empowerment, the Washington-based lender said.

This is the second part of the Resilience, Stability, and Economic Turnaround (RESET) Development Policy Operation (DPO). The first part, totaling $500 million, was disbursed in June and December 2023.

“Sri Lanka will now have the opportunity to focus on maintaining its hard-earned stability and investing in the private sector to transform the national growth trajectory,” said David Sislen, World Bank Regional Country Director for Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

“Doing so is vital to boosting economic growth, creating jobs, and ensuring that everyone benefits from a stronger, more resilient economy.”

The Second RESET DPO aims to support reforms that improve economic governance, enhance growth and competitiveness, and protect the poor and vulnerable, helping to build Sri Lanka’s resilience and fostering an equitable economy.

It focuses on improving economic governance to create a stable macroeconomic environment and restore investor confidence through key reforms including enacting a new Public Debt Management Act to better inform borrowing decisions, implementing tax administration reforms to boost revenues, and addressing financial sector risks by tightening single borrower limits and improving mechanisms for resolving non-performing loans.

It also includes amendments to the Telecommunications Act and a new Electricity Act to improve services in these markets, as well as measures to enhance export competitiveness by phasing out para-tariffs and lowering customs duties.

Enhancing women’s empowerment and reducing gender discrimination to promote higher and more sustainable growth in Sri Lanka is another key feature.