Winning Bizness Desk

Mumbai. News coming from our neighbouring country SriLanka is very grim. On Sunday two men collapsed and died while waiting in separate queues to secure fuel amid sky-rocketing prices leading to record inflation. The men, in their seventies, died while they were waiting for petrol and kerosene oil in two different parts of the country, said Srilankan police in Colombo. For weeks people have been queuing up at pumps, often for hours, and the country has been under rolling power cuts.

Lanka struggling to find dollars

On Sunday Sri Lanka suspended operations at its only fuel refinery after crude oil stocks ran out, said Ashoka Ranwala the president of the Petroleum General Employees' Union. The energy ministry have not given its comments so far. Sri Lanka has been struggling to find dollars to pay for increasingly expensive fuel shipments since January, with its foreign currency reserves dipping to $2.31 billion in February. In February Sri Lanka's inflation hit 15.1%, among the highest in Asia, with food inflation soaring to 25.7%, latest government data showed.

Exams postponed

A day before, Sri Lanka cancelled exams for millions of school students as the country ran out of printing paper with Colombo short on dollars to finance imports. Education authorities said the term tests, scheduled a week from Monday, were postponed indefinitely due to an acute paper shortage as Sri Lanka contends with its worst financial crisis since independence in 1948. "School principals cannot hold the tests as printers are unable to secure foreign exchange to import necessary paper and ink," the department of Education of the Western Province said.