Sri Lankan government rules out early Provincial Council polls
The Hindu
The Provincial Councils were added to the Sri Lankan statutes as a result of direct Indian intervention in Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority issue
The Sri Lankan government has said that the long-pending Provincial Council elections in all of its nine Provinces would not be possible until the 2017 Act is amended in Parliament.
The provincial elections have been postponed since 2017 as the then government (United National Party) wanted to reform the process by introducing a new hybrid system of first past the post and proportional representation from the current system of proportional representation.
The 2017 Act will have to be amended as in 2018 Parliament had rejected the delimitation report which should have been approved with a two-thirds majority to make the new hybrid system legal.