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Cabinet backs push to meet major project deadlines; Rs. 1.4 trillion required
View(s):By Namini Wijedasa
The Cabinet this week approved President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s proposal to complete delayed mega projects within their respective timeframes—a target that the Finance Ministry’s Project Management and Monitoring Department (PMMD) has said will need another Rs. 1.4 trillion before end-2027.
Under the Public Finance Management Act of 2024, the PMMD must prepare a report on the financial and physical progress of large-scale development projects every quarter. On Monday, the Cabinet deliberated its latest report, which analysed the status quo as of the end of March 2025.
The report revealed that, of 205 ongoing large-scale projects, 145 are scheduled to be completed this year—including 74 that ought to have been finished by the first quarter. Another 24 must reach fruition next year, along with 19 more in 2027.
The PMMD’s last publicly available report (published on its website) is the ‘Progress of Mega Scale Development Projects Fourth Quarter – 2024’. It estimates the total cost of 226 projects that were ongoing by the end of 2024 to be Rs. 3.6 trillion.
All but five are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2027. These alone will require another Rs. 1.4 trillion, the report indicates.
Sri Lanka is consistently plagued by project delays, with the top three reasons being poor performance of contractors, delays in receiving sufficient allocations/imprest and procurement lags. Also slowing implementation are delays in third-party approvals and land acquisition, changes in scope and, to a lesser degree, poor performance of consultants. PMMD reports have repeatedly flagged these issues.
Around Rs. 705bn (Rs. 0.705trn) was allocated for project implementation last year, but just Rs. 402bn, or 57 percent, had been spent. While there had been no delay in releasing funds from the Treasury, a failure to submit bills “due to the project activities not being implemented as expected” caused a drop in actual expenditure.
The worst-affected sectors are transport, highways, ports and civil aviation sectors, the report says, blaming procurement delays, poor performance of contractors, scope changes and decisions of funding agencies. There were overdue projects also in the education, water supply, energy, health and irrigation sectors.
The PMMD observes that while the shortage of finances and raw materials that negatively affected the implementation of large-scale development projects “has reduced to some extent,” overall project performance “does not show a significant improvement.”
Earlier this year, the government decided to hold quarterly progress review meetings regarding each ministry’s programmes and projects under the co-chairmanship of the relevant ministry secretary and the PMMD director-general.
Separately, a Cabinet-appointed ‘Public Investment Monitoring and Evaluation Committee’ will continue to facilitate inter-ministerial/agency coordination.
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