Long fuel queues persist in Sri Lanka despite scramble to deliver supplies

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COLOMBO (Reuters) – Long queues snaked round fuel stations in Sri Lanka’s business capital and its outskirts on Monday despite the fact that the island nation’s authorities was scrambling to deliver fuel supplies and douse any unrest because it battles a devastating financial disaster.

Kanchana Wijesekera, Sri Lanka’s minister for energy and power, mentioned supplies of 95-octane gasoline, principally used in automobiles, had been acquired and have been being distributed throughout the nation of twenty-two million those that has been fighting fuel shortages for months.

“With the two cargo vessels unloaded, petrol shares shall be obtainable for the following 6 weeks comfortably,” Wijesekera mentioned in a tweet.

Another 40,000 metric tonnes of petrol provided by India had additionally reached Sri Lanka on Monday, the Indian High Commission (Embassy) mentioned, two days after New Delhi delivered 40,000 tonnes of diesel to its southern neighbour.

Sri Lanka is in the throes of its worst financial disaster since independence, as a dire scarcity of international alternate has stalled imports and left the nation in need of fuel, medicines and hit by rolling energy cuts.

The monetary bother has come from the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic battering the tourism-reliant economic system, rising oil costs and populist tax cuts by the federal government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother, Mahinda, who resigned as prime minister this month.

M. Sudeera, an auto-rickshaw driver, was ready in a two-kilometer (1.5-mile) -long queue at Kumbuke, on the outskirts of Colombo, to fill his car, a well-liked type of public transport in town and its suburbs.

“Last time, I spent two days in line for 3,000 rupees ($8.46) value of fuel. With that I did a couple of hires nevertheless it’s barely sufficient to cowl prices,” Sudeera mentioned, standing beside parallel queues of auto-rickshaws, automobiles and bikes.

“Usually we run through the day and spent the night time in line for fuel,” he mentioned. “I’ve by no means seen something like this.”

Veteran politician Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took over as prime minister earlier this month, has warned of hardship worsening over the approaching months, together with meals shortages.

Protests towards the federal government’s dealing with of the disaster have continued for weeks, and erupted into violence earlier this month in which 9 individuals have been killed and over 300 injured. But the protests have been peaceable since then, though anger towards the federal government is excessive.

Inflation in the island nation rose to 33.8% in April, in contrast to 21.5% in March, in accordance to authorities knowledge launched on Monday.

Wickremesinghe’s cupboard was expanded on Monday, with eight new ministers sworn in for portfolios together with agriculture, fisheries, industries, transport and highways, water provide and irrigation.

($1 = 354.5000 Sri Lankan rupees)

(Reporting by Uditha Jayasinghe and Devjyot Ghoshal in COLOMBO; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)



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