Chennai: DMK members of Parliament will donate their one month's salary towards aid for the crisis-hit Sri Lanka, the party said on Thursday.
This follows an appeal from Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin, also president of the ruling DMK, for donations to help the Lankan people, even as the party has already announced Rs one crore towards this purpose.
"The DMK's Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs will contribute their one month's salary to the Chief Minister's Public Relief Fund," a party release said.
Stalin had on Tuesday appealed to the people to donate to the Tamil Nadu government to buy essentials such as food and ship it to Sri Lanka to help its people, who are battling the impact of a battered economy.
Sri Lanka’s economy is in dire straits with its usable foreign reserves down to less than $50 million, the country’s finance minister said Wednesday.
Ali Sabry was speaking to Parliament after returning to Sri Lanka from talks with the International Monetary Fund. He said any IMF rescue program, including a rapid financing instrument needed to urgently resolve shortages of essential goods, would depend on negotiations on debt restructuring with creditors and would take six months to implement.
Sri Lanka is on the brink of bankruptcy and has suspended payments on its foreign loans. Its economic miseries have brought on a political crisis, with the government facing a protests and a no-confidence motion in Parliament.
The country is due to repay $7 billion this year of the $25 billion in foreign loans it is scheduled to pay by 2026.
“There is a severe risk in front of all of us,” said Sabri. He said Sri Lanka’s reserves stood at $7.6 billion at the end of 2019 and fell to $5.7 billion by the end of 2020 as payments outpaced inflows of foreign currency amid the pandemic.
The foreign currency crisis has limited imports and caused severe shortages of essential goods like fuel, cooking gas, medicine and food. People must line up for hours to buy what they can and many return home with little, if any, of what they were seeking.
Protests have spread demanding the resignations of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who heads an influential clan that has held power for most of the past two decades, and his younger brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. An occupation of the entrance to the president’s office by protesters demanding the Rajapaksas resign was in its 26th day on Wednesday.
(with inputs from agencies)
