President Maithripala Sirisena said the government would seek the assistance of foreign specialists to seek the possibility to take forward the Uma Oya project by preventing the disturbance occurred for the people.

“The people in the area have to face the bad effects of this project which had been operated only on the political decisions, neglecting the advice of the engineers. Though the groups who corrupted millions of rupees through those wrong political decisions, and committed financial frauds are silent in front of the people’s protests today, the government will carry out an investigation against them”, he said, while speaking at a ceremony yesterday, in Nuwara Eliya.

He said a separate investigation should be carried out to look into malpractices involving the Uma Oya project which was approved without a proper environmental study. 

“When the current government came to power, the possibility to stop this project was examined. But we couldn’t stop it as 2/3rds of the project had been competed by that time. Furthermore, we had to consider moving the project forward as a huge loan had been taken from the government of Iran for this project”, he added.

President Sirisena stated that he had discussions with local and foreign specialists about the actions to be taken now. He said a German specialist on mining has started investigations and another group of specialists will arrive in Sri Lanka to carry out further studies.

The President, commenting on the protest carrying out by the workers of the Electricity Board, stated that they are on this protest as the former government gave salary increments only for the higher posts of the Electricity Board and did not provide any pay hike for lower rankers. The President added that the SAITM issue was also created by the previous government.