COLOMBO: India has committed $450 million in humanitarian assistance to help Sri Lanka recover from the devastating damage caused by Cyclone Ditwah, foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said Tuesday on a visit to the country.<\/p>\n
The cyclone killed more than 640 people when it swept across the South Asian island last month, causing floods and landslides that inflicted about $4 billion in damage, according to the World Bank, or 4 percent of the country\u2019s GDP.<\/p>\n
Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has described the storm, which affected more than two million people, as the most challenging natural disaster in the island\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
Jaishankar, who is on a two-day visit, told a media briefing in Colombo he had handed a letter from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Dissanayake, committing to a \u201creconstruction package of $450 million.\u201d<\/p>\n
While $350 million will take the form of \u201cconcessional lines of credit,\u201d the remaining $100 million will be given as grants.<\/p>\n
Jaishankar also noted the 1,100 tons of relief material, along with medicine and other necessary equipment, sent to India\u2019s southern neighbor in the cyclone\u2019s immediate aftermath.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the scale of damage, restoring connectivity was clearly an immediate priority,\u201d he said, detailing the Indian military\u2019s assistance in providing portable bridges.<\/p>\n
Jaishankar said India would also look at other ways to mitigate the losses, including encouraging Indian tourism to Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n
\u201cSimilarly, an increase in foreign direct investment from India can boost your economy at a critical time,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The cyclone struck as Sri Lanka was emerging from its worst-ever economic meltdown in 2022, when it ran out of foreign exchange reserves to pay for essential imports such as food, fuel and medicines.<\/p>\n
Following a $2.9 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund approved in early 2023, the country\u2019s economy has stabilized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
COLOMBO: India has committed $450 million in humanitarian assistance to help Sri Lanka recover from the devastating damage caused by Cyclone Ditwah, foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said Tuesday on a visit to the country. The cyclone killed more than 640 people when it swept across the South Asian island last month, causing floods and landslides …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":91373,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91374,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91363\/revisions\/91374"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}