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Break the gas monopoly

KEEPING the home fires burning will transcend the realm of metaphor and become grim reality for the country's housewives as the lead story in this newspaper revealed yesterday.

This is because of the insistence of Shell Gas Lanka Ltd., to increase prices and what is more its audacious challenge that it would curtail LPG supplies if the Government does not accede to its demand for a price increase.

The modernisation of urban society, the fast pace of town life and other such factors have ensured that gas should literally become the lifeline of average middle-class Sri Lankan life. Gone forever are those roseate days when food was cooked in clay pots over wood fires.

Such quaint mannerisms are now the strict preserve of the tourist industry catering to Westerners jaded with their own alienated ways of living.

This then is the contradiction that we are caught in. The oracles of modernity would have us believe that traditional societies such as ours would have to forsake our old ways like cooking with firewood if we are to develop.

However, the unlovely aspects of modernisation such as the reign of monopoly are an adjunct of this immersion of the innocents in the deep waters of laissez faire capital.

Our story yesterday cited Shell Gas Lanka's position where quoting statistics it has contended that the company is incurring losses.

While only those initiated into the higher realms of Algebra would be able to come to grips with this statistical tangle the reality of a sharp price increase which will drive the average household to the wall cannot be evaded.

However if the resort to devices such as gas are part of the process of modernisation the principles of the market place, so sacrosanct of modernity should hold equal water.

The very rationale of the open economy as opposed to the planned economy and introduced by the Jayewardene administration of 1977 and hailed by its admirers and apologists as the high water mark of Sri Lanka's development is the centrality of market forces.

In such a context too the existence of a monopoly cannot be countenanced particularly since the other supplier Laugfs Holdings Ltd., is nowhere in the same league.

The other sorry aspect of the situation is the incapacity of the Consumer Affairs Authority to intervene. This was a body which the proponents of an open market economy proposed as a buffer between the private companies and the governments.

However, as our lead story reveals the CAA's hands seem to be tied. Between the Government, a private company and the CAA there is obviously a grey area.

In that context the Government is faced with two options which also our story revealed. One is to subsidise the industry and the other is to intervene as a Government. However we would invite the Government to consider realistic ways of breaking the monopoly.

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