10th Parliament· 154 sittings on record · 30,475 speeches · latest 10 June 2026

The Hon. Ravi Karunanayake

New Democratic Front· National List· 7 February 2025 ·Oral question: Oral Answers to Questions and Second Round Questions

Public Finance
AI summary generated by gpt-5.5

Ravi Karunanayake questioned the interest rate spread at the National Savings Bank, noting that it pays around 3 per cent and 8 per cent on savings deposits while charging 14 to 19 per cent on loans. He asked why a State savings institution with a specific mandate to serve depositors maintains such a large margin between deposit and lending rates.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Hon. Deputy Speaker, my first supplementary question is this. The National Savings Bank (NSB) is shown as a profitable institution. Its special role is with savings deposits; it should pay interest to savers and prudently manage assets. Currently, savings are paid around 3% and a second tier around 8%, but on lending, NSB charges 14% to 19%. Why is there such a large spread? Why pay 3% on deposits and charge 14% on loans?

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Friday, 7 February 2025 ·No. 1739786070060795 ·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
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Cite as: The Hon. Ravi Karunanayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 7 February 2025. No. 1739786070060795. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/23040