Sri Lanka borrowed too much money in dollar terms in
short maturity at very high interest rates beyond other repayment
capacity and invested in non revenue generating assets and activities
. That's one reason why Sri Lanka is facing this
cry in the meantime. Over the last 56 years
, we had a lot of misfortunate events as well
as mismanagement. We had Covid, we had a
drought, we had easter attack, we had a
bond scam, we had a constitutional coup and so
many other activities. And that is the reason why
Sri Lanka is facing this crisis. Today. We've
seen a gradual slow increase in the number of protesters
. As the economy crisis started getting deeper situation started
to worsen. We saw people come out on the
streets and then we saw professors getting into the Prime
Minister's residence, we saw the Prime Minister and the
entire cabinet resigning. Then in july we saw,
you know, hon hundreds and thousands of the press
in secretariat and his and his official residence forcing him
to flee. It's not all of a sudden it
is built up over the last 6 to 7 months
as the economic crisis is worse. In Sri Lanka
, we saw the President Ronald Wickremesinghe, whose earlier
the Prime Minister and then got elected as the president
because the president had flown uh come down quite heavily
, quite strongly on the protesters kind of imposed emergency
and and he kind of defended it, saying that
, you know, you cannot have a more ruling
the nation. It's been a very, very strong
kind of reaction that we have seen from the sri
Lankan government. We do not exactly know events to
be seen how far the sri Lankan government is willing
to push it and go after the protesters and crack
down. Well, if you look at it,
Mr Ronald Wickramasinghe is a veteran politician, he's been
Prime minister several times, but he's never been president
, he's tried on through his life and this is
when he becomes president, is not in the best
of times, he's really not been elected by the
people. It's a kind of a consensus, a
compromise that has thrown him into the position that he
is now there. So the moving forward is basically
somehow securing some bridge financing to secure some essential items
for other people and then move forward from there.
But we have to come for an IMF bailout program
. But to do that, we have to progress
with the debt restructuring.