More than 169,000 people across ten districts are now affected by the dry spell driven by the El Niño pattern, the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) has reported.
A total of 169,071 people from 51,959 families in 39 Divisional Secretariat Divisions are currently impacted, Hiru News reported. Emergency drinking-water distribution has been started for 142,219 people from 43,378 families — about 84% of those affected.
The affected districts
The drought covers Ampara, Anuradhapura, Badulla, Batticaloa, Hambantota, Matale, Monaragala, Polonnaruwa, Ratnapura and Vavuniya.
Monaragala remains the worst affected, with 42,565 people from 13,062 families across seven Divisional Secretariat Divisions, where water distribution is under way. Matale follows with 37,512 people from 11,792 families, and Batticaloa with 33,394 people from 11,143 families, where distribution covers eight Divisional Secretariat Divisions.
Those three districts account for 113,471 people — just over two-thirds of the national total.
Matale’s water coverage is the thinnest of the three
The DMC figures show water reaching 18,273 people from 5,910 families in Matale, and only within one Divisional Secretariat Division. That is under half of the district’s 37,512 affected residents, against eight divisions covered in Batticaloa and seven in Monaragala. Hiru does not explain the difference, and the DMC does not say whether the remaining Matale divisions are scheduled for distribution.
Four days, two more districts
The toll has risen from 163,869 people across eight districts on 16 September, an increase of 5,202 people and two districts in four days. Our 16 September report identified seven of those eight districts by name; the current list adds Anuradhapura, Hambantota and Vavuniya to that group, so two of those three are new entries and one was the previously unnamed eighth.
Drought and flood warnings on the same day
The report lands on a day when the Met Department has forecast falls above 100 mm in the south-west and the NBRO has issued landslide early warnings for six districts.
Ratnapura appears on both lists — it is on the DMC’s drought register and inside Sunday’s landslide warning zone. Several other drought-hit districts also appear in the day’s forecast: showers or thundershowers are expected after 2 p.m. in the Uva Province, which contains Badulla and worst-hit Monaragala, and in Batticaloa and Ampara, while winds of 30–40 km/h are forecast over Hambantota and Matale.
Neither the DMC report nor the weather filings connect the two. Rain arriving over a drought-hit district does not by itself end a water shortage — the deficit is in reservoir and well storage accumulated over months, not in a single afternoon’s rainfall — but the overlap indicates the dry spell and the monsoon are now affecting the same districts simultaneously.
Not reported
The DMC does not give a cumulative figure for how long the affected divisions have been without normal supply, the cost of the distribution operation, or the number of bowsers deployed. It does not report agricultural or livestock losses, reservoir storage levels, or whether any district is approaching a threshold for further relief measures. No outlet other than Hiru carried the updated figures at the time of writing.
