Sri Lanka’s Deputy Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, Chathuranga Abeysinghe , thanked India for its financial assistance during the island nation’s economic crisis, saying New Delhi stood by Colombo through some of its most difficult years.
“We are also an energy-dependent country, so basically everything adjusts based on the energy prices. Within this year, energy prices have escalated three times, and it has impacted us with higher inflation and also pushed our cost of manufacturing up. So what we are doing now is, given the fiscal consolidation we have, the government is continuing to maintain a fiscal buffer.
“We came out of the economic crisis since 2022, and India greatly supported us with a lot of financial assistance and being there for us in all these difficult years.
“I would like to thank the Indian government and its people for being there for us at this difficult stage,” Abeysinghe said. The minister expressed his gratitude to the Indian people and said he was pleased to be back in New Delhi after a long interval. Asked what the transition from recovery to economic transformation would mean for Sri Lanka over the next three to five years, Abeysinghe said the government had concentrated on restoring financial stability, restructuring debt and introducing reforms intended to prevent a repeat of the crisis. So we were able to adjust to a certain level,” he said.
The next stage, he added, would focus on moving beyond economic stability towards expansion, with infrastructure development expected to play a central role. Many infrastructure projects had remained stalled for approximately six years, beginning in 2019, but the government had now restarted them and was working to accelerate their implementation, according to Abeysinghe. He said Sri Lanka’s exports were worth approximately $18 billion, with about a quarter going to the United States and a fifth to Europe.
