The Hon. Shanakiyan Rajaputhiran Rasamanickam
Shanakiyan Rajaputhiran Rasamanickam urged the Government and all parties to ensure the safety and welfare of Sri Lankan migrant workers in countries such as Qatar and the UAE, noting that many cannot afford to return because they mortgaged assets to migrate. He argued that their remittances have contributed significantly to Sri Lanka’s recovery and reserves, and described recent efforts to coordinate with embassies, airport quarantine officials, and hospitals to repatriate the bodies of young workers who had died by suicide.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Please allow me two or three minutes more.
¶ 02 Even when those countries are willing to repatriate people, many cannot afford tickets because they mortgaged land and homes to leave. Our youth go to Qatar and the UAE as we have failed—as politicians and as citizens—to build a future for them here. At least if we cannot build that future now, we must ensure their safety there. Regardless of party, this is our collective duty. The country’s partial recovery from bankruptcy—foreign reserves, tourism inflows—is due in part to their remittances. That is why about USD 6 billion is now in reserves.
¶ 03 We must help as much as possible. Some, in distress, have taken their own lives. In the past two weeks, I have liaised with embassies, the Airport Quarantine Office, and Colombo hospitals to bring back bodies of such young people.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Friday, 8 May 2026 ·No. 23554 ·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/22779
Cite as: The Hon. Shanakiyan Rajaputhiran Rasamanickam. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 8 May 2026. No. 23554. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/22779