Just when the tourism industry in Sri Lanka started to see a sign of revival, after almost two years since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, it appears to be facing another roadblock as the authorities plan to announce scheduled power cuts amid the prevailing energy crisis.

The country appears to be trapped in a quagmire of what has become multiple-interlinked crises, with the government struggling to find a way out. What began as a forex crisis, primarily because of the collapse of the tourism industry, blew up into an energy crisis, and now seems to jeopardise the revival of the same tourism industry.

Faced with the situation, the Central Electricity Board (CEB), the country’s power regulator, has laid out a plan, proposing scheduled power cuts, something, a country with heavy reliance on the tourism industry could ill-afford.

“No blackouts for any period of time is acceptable,” M Shantikumar, the president of The Hotels Association of Sri Lanka (THASL), was quoted as saying by The Daily Mirror. “It is essential for the government …… to get their priorities right when getting the economy back on track amid challenges.”

Power engineers have told the authorities that with the available stock of coal, diesel, and level of waters in reservoirs, they are unlikely to provide uninterrupted power. There are talks of even reducing the country’s total power consumption as much as by almost 19 percent.

Prior to the pandemic, the tourism sector was one of the country’s top forex sources, bringing over $4 billion annually. The blow the industry suffered due to the Covid-19 was one of the primary reasons for the ongoing forex crisis. Its revival is extremely important to ease the pressure.

Shantikumar said hotels can’t run at full capacity during outage hours. It can’t be compensated by diesel-powered generators; air conditioning and kitchen services will be affected, he said. International tourists, who have just started coming to Sri Lanka, won’t come because of such inconveniences, he argued.

On the one hand, the government seeks assistance from other countries to increase the number of Sri Lanka-bound travelers; on the other hand, it is damaging the commercial interests of the very same hotels tourists would stay in, by introducing power cuts, industry insiders charged.

Once a celebrated war-time defense secretary, credited with ending— though ruthlessly—the country’s three-decade-long civil war, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is unable to come to grips with the crisis, and seems struggling to provide his people with what are just basic essentials.

(SAM)