Thapodha Fernando

In the middle of nowhere 🍃

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@chamihin Lol

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@Groundhog007 @gayaradesilva True

[Slorgen @ForzenStur]

So 750MW by end of 2027 and 1200MW by end of 2028?

That would be 56B in annual savings by end of 2028.

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@SayuriYuri20 @UNPUnOFFICIAL_ @colomboinsights Well maintaining the trust is the key.
MR managed to do that for a some period of time, but he misused that trust instead making the reforms he built a corrupt state.
Privatization of SA is not a easy task no one is buying that. RW also tried that but failed miserably.

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@SayuriYuri20 @UNPUnOFFICIAL_ @colomboinsights India and china both pro communist countries before. All the narratives built on that basis.
However they managed to run a neo-liberal economy.
Why ?
Because people trusted them.
Same thing happening with NPP.They are pro-communist but slowly moving towards liberal reforms

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

Well written

[Colombo Insights (කොළඹ විත්ති) @colomboinsights]

In 1977, Sri Lanka opened its economy under J.R. Jayewardene.

In 1978, China opened its economy under Deng Xiaoping.

In 1991, India opened its economy under P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.

All three countries made the same fundamental decision to abandon the closed, state-controlled economic model and embrace markets, trade, and foreign investment.

One became the world's second-largest economy, one became the world's fifth-largest economy, and one went bankrupt in 2022. The decision to open was correct. What happened after the door opened is where the story diverges, and where the lessons lie.

To understand why Jayewardene opened the economy, we must understand what the closed economy felt like.

Under Sirimavo Bandaranaike's government from 1970 to 1977, Sri Lanka pursued an aggressive import-substitution strategy. Her mantra was "produce or perish," but the reality was closer to "ration and suffer." Essential goods like food, medicine, and basic consumer items were severely restricted, while non-essential and luxury imports were totally banned. Food rationing had been imposed since 1964, and by the mid-1970s, queues had become a defining feature of daily life. Sri Lankans queued for bread, rice, sugar, kerosene, and cloth. Black markets flourished, unemployment soared, and inflation ate wages. The government imposed price controls that created shortages, which in turn created more controls. The economy was a closed loop of scarcity, bureaucracy, and frustration.

The political cost was devastating. In the 1977 general election, the United National Party under Jayewardene won a five-sixths supermajority, which was the largest mandate in Sri Lankan history. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party was reduced to just eight seats. The country did not just vote for change; it voted for the complete demolition of the existing system. The people had spoken with unmistakable clarity, demanding that the government open the door or they would break it down.

Jayewardene moved fast. Within months of taking power, import and payment controls were liberalized, and price controls and administrative restrictions were removed to let market forces operate. Restrictions on foreign banking were eliminated, welcoming ten new foreign branches in 1979 and 1980. The Greater Colombo Economic Commission, later the Board of Investment, was created in 1978 to establish export processing zones that attracted foreign manufacturers. Foreign direct investment was incentivized through generous tax holidays and tariff exemptions. The government also accelerated the Mahaweli Development Programme, the most ambitious infrastructure project in Sri Lankan history, building dams, power plants, and irrigation systems across central Sri Lanka. Finally, the concept of privatizing state enterprises was introduced for the first time.

The initial results were spectacular. GDP growth surged, foreign investment flowed in, and the garment industry, which would become Sri Lanka's largest export sector, took root in the free trade zones. The queues disappeared and consumer goods filled the shelves. For the first time in a generation, ordinary Sri Lankans could buy what they needed without begging a bureaucrat for a permit.

The decision to open the economy was unquestionably correct. The closed economy had failed completely, producing scarcity, stagnation, corruption, and public misery. Every serious economist agrees that import-substitution industrialization in a small island economy with a limited domestic market was economically illiterate. Jayewardene ended it, and the country was initially better for it.

One year after Jayewardene opened Sri Lanka, Deng Xiaoping opened China. The parallels are striking, but the divergence is devastating. China in 1978 was poorer than Sri Lanka. After the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China's economy was shattered, its per capita income was among the lowest in the world, and approximately 88% of the population lived in extreme poverty. The country was largely agrarian, isolated, and traumatized.

Deng created Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen, which were essentially China's version of Sri Lanka's free trade zones executed at a massive scale. He dismantled agricultural communes and allowed farmers to sell surplus at market prices through the Household Responsibility System, causing agricultural output to surge overnight. He opened the door to foreign direct investment, but on China's terms, requiring foreign companies to partner with Chinese firms, transfer technology, and train workers. He maintained political stability through one-party rule while allowing economic experimentation at the provincial level. He also invested heavily in infrastructure with a long-term strategic vision and prioritized education to build human capital for manufacturing.

The results were unprecedented. GDP grew from $150 billion in 1978 to $18.74 trillion by 2024, a 125-fold increase. Poverty fell from 97.5% in 1978 to 3.1% in 2017, lifting approximately 800 million people out of poverty in the largest reduction in human history. China went from the world's 32nd largest exporter to the world's largest, and private firms now contribute approximately 70% of China's GDP.

The critical difference was not the decision to open, but what happened inside the open door. First, China had a plan, while Sri Lanka had a moment. Deng's reforms were strategic, sequenced, and ruthlessly pragmatic, moving from agriculture to light manufacturing, heavy industry, and finally technology. Sri Lanka opened everything at once with no sequencing, industrial policy, or strategic direction. Its garment industry happened almost by accident because foreign manufacturers needed cheap labor, not because of a national plan.

Second, China forced technology transfer, whereas Sri Lanka accepted whatever came. When foreign companies entered China, they were required to form joint ventures and transfer knowledge. Chinese engineers learned, adapted, and eventually innovated to build their own high-speed rail, smartphones, and space programs. Sri Lanka's free trade zones produced garments for 45 years and still produce garments because the country never required foreign investors to help it climb the value chain.

Third, China invested its economic gains back into infrastructure, education, and industrial capacity. Sri Lanka's political class treated the open economy as a patronage opportunity, distributing government contracts, jobs, and licenses to supporters rather than investing in productive capacity.

Fourth, China maintained political stability while Sri Lanka tore itself apart. Within six years of opening the economy, Sri Lanka was engulfed in a 26-year civil war that consumed an estimated 100,000 lives, billions in military spending, and the country's most productive northern and eastern regions. China faced unrest in 1989, but its economic reform program was never interrupted. Sri Lanka's war consumed the fiscal space, political attention, and international goodwill that the open economy needed to succeed.

India opened its economy 14 years after Sri Lanka and still overtook it. By 1991, India was on the brink of sovereign default with foreign exchange reserves fallen to barely two weeks of imports. The government even shipped gold to London as collateral for an emergency IMF loan. The License Raj, a Byzantine system of permits, quotas, and state controls that had strangled Indian industry since independence, had produced a sluggish growth rate of 3.5% per year while East Asia boomed.

Rao and Singh devalued the rupee to make exports competitive and dismantled the License Raj, abolishing industrial licensing for all but a handful of strategic sectors. For the first time, Indian entrepreneurs could start businesses without government permission. They reduced trade barriers, slashing tariff rates from over 200% to manageable levels, and removed import quotas. They opened to foreign investment by raising or eliminating FDI caps across sectors, allowing foreign companies to own Indian subsidiaries, and began the slow, politically painful process of privatizing state enterprises.

India's GDP grew from approximately $270 billion in 1991 to over $3.7 trillion by 2024, making it the world's fifth-largest economy and overtaking the United Kingdom. The IT services industry emerged from the reforms to generate over $200 billion in annual revenue. Poverty declined from approximately 45% in 1993 to under 12% by the early 2020s. India produced a globally competitive pharmaceutical industry, a cost-effective space program, and the world's third-largest startup ecosystem.

India succeeded where Sri Lanka failed because it invested heavily in human capital, especially technical education. The Indian Institutes of Technology, established in the 1950s and 1960s, produced a generation of engineers and scientists who powered the post-1991 boom. Sri Lanka had good basic education but never built the technical higher education infrastructure that produces globally competitive talent at scale.

Furthermore, India's democracy produced course corrections. The 1991 reforms happened because a crisis forced the political system to act, and when reforms stalled under one government, successive administrations pushed them further. Coalition politics forced compromise, but the direction of reform was never reversed. Sri Lanka's political system produced the opposite result, as every new government reversed the previous administration's economic policies. This created a whiplash of nationalization and privatization that made long-term investment impossible. While India's size gave it unique leverage, smaller nations like Singapore prove that size is an excuse rather than an explanation. Sri Lanka's strategic location on the world's busiest shipping lane remains a massive asset that has never been strategically exploited.

In 1960, the GDP per capita of Sri Lanka was $152, South Korea was $153, Taiwan was $149, Malaysia was $280, Thailand was $95, and Indonesia was $62. Sri Lanka was richer than South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia, placing it roughly on par with the countries that would become the Asian Tigers.

By 2024, South Korea's GDP per capita reached approximately $33,000, Taiwan hit $32,000, Malaysia reached $12,000, Thailand grew to $7,000, and Sri Lanka lagged behind at roughly $4,500. Sri Lanka went from being on par with South Korea to having an economy seven times smaller per capita. The country that was richer than Taiwan in 1960 is now poorer than every single comparator it started alongside. This trajectory is not the result of bad luck, geography, or colonialism; it is a governance failure on a civilizational scale.

Opening the economy in 1977 was correct, necessary, and overdue. Import substitution in a small island was economic suicide, and every comparable country that succeeded did so by opening up. There is no counter-example of a small developing country that succeeded with a closed economy. Nostalgia for the pre-1977 economy is nostalgia for queues, rations, and stagnation.

However, Jayewardene made three catastrophic errors that doomed the open economy to underperformance. First, he created the Executive Presidency. The 1978 Constitution concentrated power in one person with virtually no checks, creating a system where the president could override parliament, appoint judges, dissolve the legislature, and govern by decree. Every subsequent abuse of power, including the ethnic pogroms, the war, systemic corruption, and the 2022 collapse, was enabled by this institutional architecture. He opened the economy and closed the democracy, when the country needed both to be open.

Second, he ignited the ethnic conflict. The 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom happened on his watch, and credible evidence suggests elements of his government were complicit. The civil war that followed consumed the economic gains of liberalization as military spending crowded out investment, agricultural regions were destroyed, foreign investors fled, and tourism collapsed.

Third, he lacked an industrial policy. Jayewardene opened the door and assumed the market would do the rest. In contrast, South Korea opened its economy and directed industrial policy, channeling credit and support to major conglomerates until they became globally competitive. Singapore opened and built world-class institutions like its Economic Development Board and sovereign wealth funds. Sri Lanka opened and did nothing, attracting garment manufacturers who came only for cheap labor. Decades later, Sri Lanka still exports the same basic products it exported in 1977.

The question of whether Jayewardene was right to open the economy is the wrong question. It is like asking if a doctor was right to prescribe medicine to a dying patient. The medicine was correct, but the doctor also broke the patient's legs through the executive presidency, set fire to the patient's house by fueling ethnic conflict, and forgot to prescribe a follow-up treatment plan via industrial policy.

China opened and built Shenzhen. India opened and built Bangalore. South Korea opened and built Samsung. Singapore opened and built itself. Sri Lanka opened and built the Mattala airport, an empty international airport in the jungle funded by foreign debt that stands as a concrete monument to what happens when an open economy meets closed minds.

The door opened in 1977 was the right door, but what Sri Lanka built on the other side is why a country that was richer than South Korea in 1960 went bankrupt in 2022. The open economy did not fail Sri Lanka; its leaders failed the open economy.

#SriLanka #Economy #Politics

[Colombo Insights (කොළඹ විත්ති) @colomboinsights]

In 1977, Sri Lanka opened its economy under J.R. Jayewardene.

In 1978, China opened its economy under Deng Xiaoping.

In 1991, India opened its economy under P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.

All three countries made the same fundamental decision to abandon the closed, state-controlled economic model and embrace markets, trade, and foreign investment.

One became the world's second-largest economy, one became the world's fifth-largest economy, and one went bankrupt in 2022. The decision to open was correct. What happened after the door opened is where the story diverges, and where the lessons lie.

To understand why Jayewardene opened the economy, we must understand what the closed economy felt like.

Under Sirimavo Bandaranaike's government from 1970 to 1977, Sri Lanka pursued an aggressive import-substitution strategy. Her mantra was "produce or perish," but the reality was closer to "ration and suffer." Essential goods like food, medicine, and basic consumer items were severely restricted, while non-essential and luxury imports were totally banned. Food rationing had been imposed since 1964, and by the mid-1970s, queues had become a defining feature of daily life. Sri Lankans queued for bread, rice, sugar, kerosene, and cloth. Black markets flourished, unemployment soared, and inflation ate wages. The government imposed price controls that created shortages, which in turn created more controls. The economy was a closed loop of scarcity, bureaucracy, and frustration.

The political cost was devastating. In the 1977 general election, the United National Party under Jayewardene won a five-sixths supermajority, which was the largest mandate in Sri Lankan history. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party was reduced to just eight seats. The country did not just vote for change; it voted for the complete demolition of the existing system. The people had spoken with unmistakable clarity, demanding that the government open the door or they would break it down.

Jayewardene moved fast. Within months of taking power, import and payment controls were liberalized, and price controls and administrative restrictions were removed to let market forces operate. Restrictions on foreign banking were eliminated, welcoming ten new foreign branches in 1979 and 1980. The Greater Colombo Economic Commission, later the Board of Investment, was created in 1978 to establish export processing zones that attracted foreign manufacturers. Foreign direct investment was incentivized through generous tax holidays and tariff exemptions. The government also accelerated the Mahaweli Development Programme, the most ambitious infrastructure project in Sri Lankan history, building dams, power plants, and irrigation systems across central Sri Lanka. Finally, the concept of privatizing state enterprises was introduced for the first time.

The initial results were spectacular. GDP growth surged, foreign investment flowed in, and the garment industry, which would become Sri Lanka's largest export sector, took root in the free trade zones. The queues disappeared and consumer goods filled the shelves. For the first time in a generation, ordinary Sri Lankans could buy what they needed without begging a bureaucrat for a permit.

The decision to open the economy was unquestionably correct. The closed economy had failed completely, producing scarcity, stagnation, corruption, and public misery. Every serious economist agrees that import-substitution industrialization in a small island economy with a limited domestic market was economically illiterate. Jayewardene ended it, and the country was initially better for it.

One year after Jayewardene opened Sri Lanka, Deng Xiaoping opened China. The parallels are striking, but the divergence is devastating. China in 1978 was poorer than Sri Lanka. After the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China's economy was shattered, its per capita income was among the lowest in the world, and approximately 88% of the population lived in extreme poverty. The country was largely agrarian, isolated, and traumatized.

Deng created Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen, which were essentially China's version of Sri Lanka's free trade zones executed at a massive scale. He dismantled agricultural communes and allowed farmers to sell surplus at market prices through the Household Responsibility System, causing agricultural output to surge overnight. He opened the door to foreign direct investment, but on China's terms, requiring foreign companies to partner with Chinese firms, transfer technology, and train workers. He maintained political stability through one-party rule while allowing economic experimentation at the provincial level. He also invested heavily in infrastructure with a long-term strategic vision and prioritized education to build human capital for manufacturing.

The results were unprecedented. GDP grew from $150 billion in 1978 to $18.74 trillion by 2024, a 125-fold increase. Poverty fell from 97.5% in 1978 to 3.1% in 2017, lifting approximately 800 million people out of poverty in the largest reduction in human history. China went from the world's 32nd largest exporter to the world's largest, and private firms now contribute approximately 70% of China's GDP.

The critical difference was not the decision to open, but what happened inside the open door. First, China had a plan, while Sri Lanka had a moment. Deng's reforms were strategic, sequenced, and ruthlessly pragmatic, moving from agriculture to light manufacturing, heavy industry, and finally technology. Sri Lanka opened everything at once with no sequencing, industrial policy, or strategic direction. Its garment industry happened almost by accident because foreign manufacturers needed cheap labor, not because of a national plan.

Second, China forced technology transfer, whereas Sri Lanka accepted whatever came. When foreign companies entered China, they were required to form joint ventures and transfer knowledge. Chinese engineers learned, adapted, and eventually innovated to build their own high-speed rail, smartphones, and space programs. Sri Lanka's free trade zones produced garments for 45 years and still produce garments because the country never required foreign investors to help it climb the value chain.

Third, China invested its economic gains back into infrastructure, education, and industrial capacity. Sri Lanka's political class treated the open economy as a patronage opportunity, distributing government contracts, jobs, and licenses to supporters rather than investing in productive capacity.

Fourth, China maintained political stability while Sri Lanka tore itself apart. Within six years of opening the economy, Sri Lanka was engulfed in a 26-year civil war that consumed an estimated 100,000 lives, billions in military spending, and the country's most productive northern and eastern regions. China faced unrest in 1989, but its economic reform program was never interrupted. Sri Lanka's war consumed the fiscal space, political attention, and international goodwill that the open economy needed to succeed.

India opened its economy 14 years after Sri Lanka and still overtook it. By 1991, India was on the brink of sovereign default with foreign exchange reserves fallen to barely two weeks of imports. The government even shipped gold to London as collateral for an emergency IMF loan. The License Raj, a Byzantine system of permits, quotas, and state controls that had strangled Indian industry since independence, had produced a sluggish growth rate of 3.5% per year while East Asia boomed.

Rao and Singh devalued the rupee to make exports competitive and dismantled the License Raj, abolishing industrial licensing for all but a handful of strategic sectors. For the first time, Indian entrepreneurs could start businesses without government permission. They reduced trade barriers, slashing tariff rates from over 200% to manageable levels, and removed import quotas. They opened to foreign investment by raising or eliminating FDI caps across sectors, allowing foreign companies to own Indian subsidiaries, and began the slow, politically painful process of privatizing state enterprises.

India's GDP grew from approximately $270 billion in 1991 to over $3.7 trillion by 2024, making it the world's fifth-largest economy and overtaking the United Kingdom. The IT services industry emerged from the reforms to generate over $200 billion in annual revenue. Poverty declined from approximately 45% in 1993 to under 12% by the early 2020s. India produced a globally competitive pharmaceutical industry, a cost-effective space program, and the world's third-largest startup ecosystem.

India succeeded where Sri Lanka failed because it invested heavily in human capital, especially technical education. The Indian Institutes of Technology, established in the 1950s and 1960s, produced a generation of engineers and scientists who powered the post-1991 boom. Sri Lanka had good basic education but never built the technical higher education infrastructure that produces globally competitive talent at scale.

Furthermore, India's democracy produced course corrections. The 1991 reforms happened because a crisis forced the political system to act, and when reforms stalled under one government, successive administrations pushed them further. Coalition politics forced compromise, but the direction of reform was never reversed. Sri Lanka's political system produced the opposite result, as every new government reversed the previous administration's economic policies. This created a whiplash of nationalization and privatization that made long-term investment impossible. While India's size gave it unique leverage, smaller nations like Singapore prove that size is an excuse rather than an explanation. Sri Lanka's strategic location on the world's busiest shipping lane remains a massive asset that has never been strategically exploited.

In 1960, the GDP per capita of Sri Lanka was $152, South Korea was $153, Taiwan was $149, Malaysia was $280, Thailand was $95, and Indonesia was $62. Sri Lanka was richer than South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia, placing it roughly on par with the countries that would become the Asian Tigers.

By 2024, South Korea's GDP per capita reached approximately $33,000, Taiwan hit $32,000, Malaysia reached $12,000, Thailand grew to $7,000, and Sri Lanka lagged behind at roughly $4,500. Sri Lanka went from being on par with South Korea to having an economy seven times smaller per capita. The country that was richer than Taiwan in 1960 is now poorer than every single comparator it started alongside. This trajectory is not the result of bad luck, geography, or colonialism; it is a governance failure on a civilizational scale.

Opening the economy in 1977 was correct, necessary, and overdue. Import substitution in a small island was economic suicide, and every comparable country that succeeded did so by opening up. There is no counter-example of a small developing country that succeeded with a closed economy. Nostalgia for the pre-1977 economy is nostalgia for queues, rations, and stagnation.

However, Jayewardene made three catastrophic errors that doomed the open economy to underperformance. First, he created the Executive Presidency. The 1978 Constitution concentrated power in one person with virtually no checks, creating a system where the president could override parliament, appoint judges, dissolve the legislature, and govern by decree. Every subsequent abuse of power, including the ethnic pogroms, the war, systemic corruption, and the 2022 collapse, was enabled by this institutional architecture. He opened the economy and closed the democracy, when the country needed both to be open.

Second, he ignited the ethnic conflict. The 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom happened on his watch, and credible evidence suggests elements of his government were complicit. The civil war that followed consumed the economic gains of liberalization as military spending crowded out investment, agricultural regions were destroyed, foreign investors fled, and tourism collapsed.

Third, he lacked an industrial policy. Jayewardene opened the door and assumed the market would do the rest. In contrast, South Korea opened its economy and directed industrial policy, channeling credit and support to major conglomerates until they became globally competitive. Singapore opened and built world-class institutions like its Economic Development Board and sovereign wealth funds. Sri Lanka opened and did nothing, attracting garment manufacturers who came only for cheap labor. Decades later, Sri Lanka still exports the same basic products it exported in 1977.

The question of whether Jayewardene was right to open the economy is the wrong question. It is like asking if a doctor was right to prescribe medicine to a dying patient. The medicine was correct, but the doctor also broke the patient's legs through the executive presidency, set fire to the patient's house by fueling ethnic conflict, and forgot to prescribe a follow-up treatment plan via industrial policy.

China opened and built Shenzhen. India opened and built Bangalore. South Korea opened and built Samsung. Singapore opened and built itself. Sri Lanka opened and built the Mattala airport, an empty international airport in the jungle funded by foreign debt that stands as a concrete monument to what happens when an open economy meets closed minds.

The door opened in 1977 was the right door, but what Sri Lanka built on the other side is why a country that was richer than South Korea in 1960 went bankrupt in 2022. The open economy did not fail Sri Lanka; its leaders failed the open economy.

#SriLanka #Economy #Politics

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@slnat21 @chami9539 Lol
You can ask from former navy officer how YR brought motivation to them.

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@slnat21 @chami9539 A person who never went to war cannot be first of his badge right?
And they have lowered the educational qualifications just for him
So does he deserve for that UK MILITARY TRAINING?

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@slnat21 @chami9539 Lol minor recruitment mishandling
Your YR robbed millions of tax payers money by going to UK training program which he is no deserved.

[Ravinda Senarath @ravinda88]

මම හිතන්නෙ බැනපු මිනිස්සු විසින්ම තමන්ට මල් මාලා දාන එකෙ ආතල් එක හැමෝටම ගන්න වෙන්නෙ නෑ. සමහරුන්ට ඒ භාග්‍ය ජීවත්ව සිටියදි උදාවෙන්නෙ නෑ. ඒ භාග්‍ය සුනිල් කුමාර සහෝදරයා ජීවත් ව සිටියදි ප්‍රතිඵල සමග භුක්ති විදිමින් රට ක්‍රීඩාව ඔස්සෙ ජයග්‍රහණ වෙනුවෙන් මෙහෙයවමින් සිටිනවා

[Chaminda Dias @chami9539]

Glad to see this finally being taken up as well.

The environment and animal welfare are easy to ignore because they don't vote, but they deserve protection all the same.

Next, I hope, is the long-awaited Child Welfare Bill.

These amendments to the act aren't revolutionary, but they seem to make it harder to abuse existing systems and strengthens the powers of the environmental authorities. It also tightens environmental impact assessments and oversight which we know has been abused over and over again specially in favour of mega projects like port city and Mattala airport and even Ambuluwawa.

Good to see the government spending political capital on areas that don't necessarily translate into votes, but are important for the country's future.

#SriLanka
#SystemChangeLK

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@Rajni_Gamage Harsha de silva and his government failed to collect taxes and so called economic genius couldn’t maintain even 4% GDP growth.
Theory is one thing and execution is one thing.
If this government continues what they doing on increasing taxable base they will definitely lower thetax

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@ForzenStur Same

[TZA Throwing Zone Athletics @MichaelMMG71]

Almost perfect… he still throws too high… and he can push forward more…(chest)… he threw 88.62 m… he corrects this and will go 93-95 m. Amazing talent

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

Say no to SOEs

[Dineth Heshan  @dinethheshan__]

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗸𝗮 𝗦𝘂𝗴𝗮𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 ?

​While few long term loss making SOEs have turned around and become profitable over the last few years, Lanka Sugar Company has taken a sharp turn in the opposite direction.

📈 2021: LKR 819 Mn Profit
📈 2022: LKR 4,910 Mn Profit
📈 2023: LKR 3,340 Mn Profit

​📉 2024: LKR 2,010 Mn Loss
📉 2025: LKR 3,193 Mn Loss

🧬 ​The SEO which manages both the Pelwatta and Sevanagala sugar factories is now heavily relying on credit lines for survival

🧬 ​They have taken out a LKR 500Mn loan and a LKR 1Bn bank overdraft simply to cover basic day-to-day operations and staff salaries.

🧬 ​The Pelwatta division alone has missed over LKR 3.2 billion in statutory EPF contributions alongside millions in unpaid VAT.

🧬 The SOE is severely behind on payments to local sugarcane growers owing roughly LKR 300Mn at Pelwatta and LKR 205Mn at Sevanagala.

​𝗠𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗳𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀

​The peak performance in 2022 – 2023 wasn't entirely built on organic efficiency it was the direct result of macroeconomic policy changes.

When strict import restrictions on foreign ethanol and sugar were introduced the company was able to offset its high structural overheads with premium selling prices and a captive market monopoly.

However it is important to note that even before these import restrictions came into play, the SOE was already profitable in 2021.

​#SriLanka

[Ada Derana @adaderana]

Sri Lanka bans export of mineral resources without value addition

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@risXKS45 😂😂

[Ris 🇱🇰🏴‍☠️ @risXKS45]

All the wannabe on LKA Twitter submit your proposal to increase Lankan GDP by the 16th or bust.

That's the furthest your tweet can actually affect reality. Otherwise, have fun talking to digital walls.

[Thapodha Fernando @thapodha_f]

@imNaviya Lol