Whilst a detail report is awaited from the foreign consultant, Central Bank estimates that solutions' cost for the banking sector alone was in the range of Rs. Concerns have been expressed that almost all related and unrelated sectors must be Year 2000 compliant if Sri Lanka were to avoid serious repercussions. Primarily among them are the Ceylon Electricity Board, Water Board, Sri Lanka Telecom, Sri Lanka Ports Authority, Sri Lanka Customs, Airport, Travel, Defence, Immigration, Government hospitals, Insurance companies etc. Despite estimates being available for only the banking sector, the absence of cost implications to public utilities as well as other semi-government and private sector institutions is considered as another problem. By now ideally we should know which institutions have the problem and compliant measures being implemented.
People tend to be complacent owing to the relative low level of computerisation in the country.
But the Y2K does not confine to computers alone. Though the Government has already instructed all state institutions to set up internal task forces in all institutions to check on the year 2000 compatibility of their computer and micro processor based systems and equipments, progress is said to be less encouraging. The directive follows the Cabinet approving a memorandum presented by Science and Technology Minister Batty Weerakoon recently highlighting the urgent need for all sectors of the economy to address this issue. The problems can cause, due to the failure of computer and micro processor based equipment, difficulties in correctly processing data involving dates due to two reasons. One is that the computer software which process dates have been developed to typically ignore the century in order to save storage space.