Nearly 265,000 students between Grade 1 and Grade 10 have dropped out of school over the past five years, according to the Bureau of Rehabilitation.
Professor Wasantha Subasinghe, who chairs the Bureau’s Governing Council, said widespread drug addiction among young people had been a major contributing factor. She was speaking at a press conference in Colombo on Thursday.
Subasinghe called for an urgent programme to address school dropouts and to stop affected children falling into drug use and other high-risk situations. The Bureau of Rehabilitation, which operates under the Ministry of Public Security, runs the state’s drug treatment and offender rehabilitation centres — placing it at the receiving end of the trend it is describing rather than in charge of school retention.
The figure does not sit easily with the parliamentary record
The Bureau’s number is difficult to reconcile with the only other official series in circulation.
In June, Prime Minister and Education Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya told Parliament that 267,138 children dropped out between 2018 and 2024 — a figure covering the same Grade 1 to Grade 10 range, but spanning seven years rather than five. The two totals are within about 1% of each other despite covering periods two years apart in length.
The annual breakdown the Prime Minister gave does not contain a five-year window matching the Bureau’s total. The last five years of that series, 2020 to 2024, sum to 186,796. The highest five consecutive years, 2019 to 2023, sum to 202,476. Neither approaches 265,000.
That leaves two possibilities, and the reporting does not distinguish between them: either the Bureau is restating the parliamentary total under a different period label, or dropout numbers have risen sharply since the census data underpinning the 2018–2024 series. The Bureau did not publish an annual breakdown, name its data source, or say which five years it means.
The distinction matters for the claim attached to it. Whether drug addiction is driving a worsening trend, or is being offered as an explanation for a total already reported to Parliament under a different frame, depends on which of those readings is correct.
Context
The government has been escalating its response to narcotics on several fronts. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake told the 160th Police Day commemoration on the same day that the government would amend the Constitution if that was what curbing drug trafficking required, citing seizures including 44,684kg of Kerala cannabis and 16.2 million narcotic pills. In August, the Bureau of Rehabilitation was reported to be handling 1,506 inmates referred for drug rehabilitation amid prison overcrowding.
Not reported
No other verified newsroom had filed on the press conference at the time of writing. Hiru News did not report the period the five-year figure covers, the source of the data, any breakdown by grade or district, or what programme the Bureau is proposing. The Ministry of Education has not commented on the figure.
