{"id":86841,"date":"2019-03-30T18:49:59","date_gmt":"2019-03-31T01:49:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=86841"},"modified":"2019-03-30T18:49:59","modified_gmt":"2019-03-31T01:49:59","slug":"how-our-water-becomes-power-is-sold-in-rupees-but-profits-go-out-in-our-debt-increases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/03\/30\/how-our-water-becomes-power-is-sold-in-rupees-but-profits-go-out-in-our-debt-increases\/","title":{"rendered":"How our water becomes Power, is sold in Rupees, but profits go out in $: Our Debt increases"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>by Garvin Karunaratne<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>Sri Lanka is a country\nwhich is rich in resources. Sadly we, our leaders, do not realize that we can\ndevelop these resources and save our foreign exchange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even our water in our streams is being\nconverted to foreign exchange and is being sent abroad as profits by\nmultinationals. In the Papers (the LBO) it is reported that a Japanese Firm is\ninvesting a million dollars on a mini hydro plant at Eratna in Ratnapura. It\nmeans that the waters of the Kalu Ganga will be used to generate power and sold\nto the Electricity Board and to people in the area and the profits, in terms of\npayment for the electricity consumed will be sent off to the owners of the\nJapanese company in hard foreign exchange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In a recent paper of mine, I highlighted how\nthe waters of a stream that flows into the Mahaweli River at Udugama on the\nGampola Nuwara Eliya Road, are being developed into a mini hydro plant by a\nGerman company, and once it is done the power will be sold and the profits will\nflow in foreign exchange to Germany from Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That is how our water resources are being\nturned into foreign exchange to be taken out of our country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is a simple thing to develop a mini hydro\nplant. Many of our tea estates had mini hydro- plants and generated power to\nrun the factories. Instead of developing better designs we encourage foreigners\nto come in and convert our water resources to power, and then convert power to\nforeign exchange and take it away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Currently there is a group of protesters who\nare very active against developing mini hydro plants. They say it is against\nthe environment. It is up to our leaders to direct that our engineers build\ndesigns that will develop mini hydro plants that do not damage the environment\nand get them implemented. Mini Hydro plants can be designed and built in\nmonths, not years and we can face the onslaught of power cuts that are expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Garvin Karunaratne<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Garvin Karunaratne Sri Lanka is a country which is rich in resources. Sadly we, our leaders, do not realize that we can develop these resources and save our foreign exchange. Even our water in our streams is being converted to foreign exchange and is being sent abroad as profits by multinationals. In the Papers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-garvin-karunaratne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}