Group protests economic conditions in Sri Lanka
By Justin Seward - Lethbridge Herald on April 12, 2022.
Members of the Lethbridge Lankans held a protest last week in light of a deteriorating economic situation in Sri Lanka.The situation ranges from the scarcity of food items and its prices to a problem with oil and gas among other things. The Lankans staged their protest on April 4.
In March food prices rose 30 per cent, which was a record high, while to live in tourism-reliant areas has become unattainable for many.
“As a whole, it’s going through a very bad situation,” said Sampath Walgama, Lethbridge Lankans member. “But what ties into that and what people see is that it’s because of the very bad governance. There are actually people who were forecasting this situation to happen right at this stage. So, you would have seen that this kind of protest and everything goes all over the world and now it has gone wider.”
Walgama says with everything that they are doing, that doesn’t mean that we cannot make a huge impact or difference on what’s happening there.
“But at least there is to show that we are not happy with what’s going on there and we want to save Sri Lanka from this catastrophic event,” said Walgama.
Walgama said, “And taking everything into consideration, now we lead to kind of a civil unrest and that collapses everything.”
The crisis had led into transport, added Walgama.
“I had seen a news item that there is a severe shortage of some medicines that’s very critical for heart attacks and (that) kind of thing,” he said. “And countries, even basically in debt — I don’t know what’s going on there. Nobody understands what they do, right, so they sit on the debt. And then again that’s also the ruling party. If I put another word that summarizes everything is that people say, ‘We know that they are very corrupted’.'”
There are no plans for another protest at this time. 2
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