The Hon. Namal Karunaratne
Namal Karunaratne stated that when the Government assumed responsibility for the paddy stores, purchases had stopped and facilities were damaged, with stores affected by wildlife and rice mill machinery and drying-yard fittings removed or sold as scrap. He said the Government is restoring the stores and related operations, and is planning to install paddy dryers where possible in the future.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Hon. Member, when we took charge of the paddy stores, they were closed. Paddy purchases had been halted. The stores had been damaged by elephants and infested with bats and rats. After harvesting, farmers bring their yields—both to Government stores and elsewhere. Once the paddy is cut, we call those fields “eipanella” (post-harvest paddy fields). Wild buffalo come to those fields and root up the ground. Just as the buffalo uproot the eipanella, those stores had been gutted. Machinery in the rice mills had been cut up and sold as scrap iron. Steel fittings from the drying yards had been removed. We are now restoring all of that and returning operations to normal. We are also planning, as much as possible, to install paddy dryers in the future.
¶ 02 Hon. Member, that is the answer.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Wednesday, 22 October 2025 ·No. 22638 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
- Page · column
- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
- Permalink
/lk/speeches/12313
Cite as: The Hon. Namal Karunaratne. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 22 October 2025. No. 22638. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/12313