Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) MP S. M. Marikkar criticised the National People’s Power government in Parliament yesterday (20) following Sri Lanka’s second nationwide power outage in recent months.
Highlighting the severe disruption caused when a total grid collapse left 22 million citizens without electricity for roughly six hours, he said that two nationwide blackouts under the NPP government have exposed serious failures in national grid management.
He claimed that financial losses from power sector mismanagement have also mounted rapidly alongside the administrative failures surrounding these blackouts.
Marikkar pointed out that the current administration experienced its first total grid failure in February 2025, after which an official investigative committee issued clear recommendations to prevent future system collapses.
He demanded that the Energy Minister inform Parliament whether those corrective measures were ever put into practice, accusing the government of total indifference.
Turnaround costs and operational failures related to coal procurement have further compounded the crisis.
Marikkar revealed that the import of substandard coal alone caused a direct loss of over Rs. 18 billion, while an extra Rs. 26 million was spent on third party laboratory testing for six coal shipments.
Furthermore, the reliance on inferior coal forced the government to spend over Rs. 20 billion on emergency supplementary power purchases between January and September.
He asserted that the combined financial damage from these procurement decisions is double the loss recorded during the Central Bank bond scandal.
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