Dark Age: Broke Sri Lanka has no diesel, shuts even street lights
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Sri Lanka has stopped the sale of diesel across the island nation and even announced to shut off street lights as it has no money left to pay for fuels.
On Thursday, Sri Lanka, in a dire economic crisis due mainly to its crippled tourism sector, jobless expatriates stopping remittances, other foreign loans, and a Chinese debt trap, stopped the sale of diesel all over the country. It has crippled transport across the crisis-hit country where its 22 million people are already facing hours-long power cuts.
India’s next-door neighbor is facing its worst economic downturn since Independence in 1948. An acute shortage of foreign currency sparked its immediate crisis, as Colombo could not import even essential items.
Exorbitantly priced petrol was on sale at some places but in short supply, forcing motorists to abandon their cars in long queues. “We are siphoning off fuel from buses that are in the garage for repairs and using that diesel to operate serviceable vehicles,” Transport Minister Dilum Amunugama said, according to the media reports on Thursday.
Even private buses are going off the roads. Their owners, who run two-thirds of the country’s fleet, said they had no fuel and even skeleton services may become impossible after Friday.
Officials said they would have to enforce a 13-hour power cut from Thursday — the longest ever — because they had no diesel to run generators.
“We are promised new supplies in two days and if that happens, we can reduce the length of power cuts,” Ceylon Electricity Board chairman M. M. C. Ferdinando told reporters.
He said hydro reservoirs, which provide more than a third of electricity demand, were also dangerously low in water levels.
The lengthy power cuts forced the Colombo Stock Exchange to curtail its trading by half to two hours, while many offices asked non-essential staff to stay at home.
The electricity rationing also hit mobile phone base stations and affected the quality of calls, operators said, adding that their standby generators were also without diesel, the media said.
The shortages of all essential services have sparked outrage across Sri Lanka, as protesters and motorists blocked main roads in several towns and cities.
The situation is so grim that even government-run hospitals stopped surgeries as they ran out of essential life-saving medicines, while most have stopped diagnostic tests requiring imported chemicals, already in short supply.
In March 2020, Sri Lanka had banned most imports to save foreign currency that is needed to service its whopping USD 51 billion in foreign debt. But this led to widespread shortages of essential goods and sharp price rises.
The government said it is seeking a bailout from the International Monetary Fund while asking for more loans from India and China.
