President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has approved extending the monthly Rs. 25,000 rent allowance paid to families displaced by Cyclone Ditwah until December 31, Leader of the House Bimal Ratnayake told Parliament on Wednesday.
The scheme had been due to expire this month. The extension was announced after opposition MPs raised concerns in the chamber that some affected families would be left without assistance when it lapsed, the Daily Mirror reported.
The allowance is paid to households that lost their homes and have no permanent place to live. It is the bridging payment that keeps displaced families in rented accommodation while permanent housing is built — which makes its expiry date a function of construction progress rather than of the calendar.
Kegalle: 2,422 to be resettled, on land the NBRO has cleared
In the same sitting, government MP Manoj Rajapaksa said around 2,422 people displaced in Kegalle District are expected to be resettled soon, the Daily Mirror reported separately.
Land is currently being cleared. 52 plots have already been allocated to families, and houses are to be built on 10 of them. The resettlement is being carried out on land approved by the National Building Research Organisation — the agency that certifies whether a site is safe from landslide risk, which is the central question in Kegalle, a district where the cyclone’s damage came primarily from earth movement rather than flooding.
Rajapaksa said 642 displaced people have opted to resettle outside Kegalle District altogether. Resettlement has already been completed in Bulathkohupitiya and Yatiyantota.
Two MPs, two different displacement figures
The two accounts do not agree on how many people the cyclone displaced in Kegalle. Rajapaksa put the figure awaiting resettlement at 2,422; MP Sujith Sanjay Perera told the same sitting that the number displaced in the district is as high as 3,064.
The gap of 642 is exactly the number Rajapaksa said had chosen to resettle outside the district — which suggests the two MPs are counting the same population, with one figure covering those to be resettled within Kegalle and the other the district’s total displaced. Neither MP said so, and the Daily Mirror does not reconcile them, so this remains an inference rather than a stated fact.
Where this sits in the recovery
The extension and the Kegalle timetable are consistent with a rebuild that is still well short of complete more than nine months after the cyclone. The Defence Ministry said in August that 4,918 houses were under construction for Ditwah victims, and the UN offered further support for resettlement as recently as Sunday. Compensation has been disbursed in tranches by district, including 248 families in Badulla in August.
A parliamentary select committee is separately examining the response to the disaster and questioned police officers last week as its reporting deadline approached.
Not reported
Neither report gives the number of families receiving the rent allowance nationally, its monthly cost to the Treasury, or how many times it has previously been extended. Neither says what happens to recipients still without permanent housing after December 31, whether the extension requires Cabinet or parliamentary approval beyond the President’s, or which ministry administers the payment.
On Kegalle, no date is given for the resettlement, and no report says how many houses are needed in total against the 10 now planned, who is funding the construction, where the 642 opting to leave the district will go, or how long families have been in temporary accommodation. The Daily Mirror does not name the opposition MPs who raised the lapse.
Both reports are by the same Daily Mirror parliamentary team. No other verified Sri Lankan newsroom had filed either story at the time of writing, and Ada Derana was unreachable, returning a server-side block across the whole domain.
