- CCIY blames Govt. system
Despite the Sri Lanka diaspora being ready to invest in the country, the Northern Province is unfriendly to investors, The Daily Morning Business learnt.
Speaking to The Daily Morning Business, Chamber of Commerce and Industries of Yalpanam (CCIY) Governor K. Vignesh said: “From the Chamber side, we have put up a great effort, even personally I have visited Canada and some other countries to promote our local diaspora to invest here. Although they are really willing to invest here, unfortunately we are in a very bad condition because our Government system is not allowing them to freely move and invest here.”
He explained that the Northern Province is not investor friendly, especially for getting the salutary permissions for the tourism, agriculture and other divergent sectors. If an investor is going to start an industry,they have to get nearly 19 types of permissions from various departments such as coastal conservation, forest, and likewise.
Plus, the application process and approval process is not easy. They have been dragging it for years. Moreover, he stressed the fact that: “I have a ton of examples of these kinds of things. Every year, the Government allots funds through its budget for worthwhile initiatives, but no one is certain what percentage of it they effectively do.”
“In addition, When they come to the country for this new venture because of the huge time period taken for the approval procedure, since they can't spend years and years over here, they fly back.”
The country should speed up and facilitate them to establish their organisations here. The system is not interrelated, each and every entity they are playing their own role, even the Forest Department, they play their own role, they are not bothered about the Environment sector. Plus the lack of public-private participation, the private sector is totally dependent on the public sector authorities, he noted.
According to Dr.Vignesh the Government is not helpful for the development of the SMEs, as he alleged, do not promote and release the Government funded programmes such as Asian Development Bank and the World Bank programmes.
“Moreover, there are various international financial institutions ready to fund the dairy, agriculture and the fisheries sectors, for the development and betterment of the particular sectors with loans yet our local financial institutions are not prepared to release those special schemes. Since, they always promote their own loan schemes with the high interest rates among the SMEs,” he said.