Sri Lanka received 12,000 agricultural job placements from overseas employers under the previous government but filled only about 2,000 of them, losing the remaining 10,000, the chairman of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment has said.
Kosala Wickramasinghe blamed “fraudulent and corrupt practices” and poor handling of overseas opportunities for the shortfall, the Daily Mirror reported.
He said the Bureau is pursuing legal action against corruption involving licensed employment agencies and individuals connected to them.
Wickramasinghe made the remarks on September 21, addressing a group of Sri Lankans preparing to leave for work in Israel — the same week the Bureau issued air tickets to 204 workers bound for Israel.
The Israel dispute
Israel has become a highly sought-after destination, Wickramasinghe said, because of strong labour demand and comparatively high wages.
He rejected as “completely incorrect and misleading” the claim that the number of Israeli government placements had fallen because jobs were being routed through private agencies. The Bureau could not place the same number of workers abroad without the agencies’ contribution, he argued.
The Daily Mirror’s report does not specify which country the lost 12,000 agricultural placements came from. Given that the remarks were delivered to Israel-bound workers, the two subjects are easily conflated; on the published record they are separate claims.
The numbers do not fully line up
Two figures in the same address sit oddly together.
Wickramasinghe put the number leaving annually through legal channels at around 300,000 — broadly consistent with the Bureau’s 250,000 target for 2026.
He then said the total who had gone abroad for work was around 125,000, of whom about 11,000 went through government channels and 114,000 through licensed agencies or their own arrangements.
The internal arithmetic checks out — 11,000 plus 114,000 is 125,000, and the government-channel figure matches his own breakdown of roughly 5,000 to Israel, 5,000 to South Korea and 1,000 to Japan each year. But 125,000 cannot be an annual total if 300,000 leave each year. The report does not say what period the smaller figure covers; a year-to-date count for 2026 would fit, though that is inference, not something the source states.
Welfare measures
Wickramasinghe said the Bureau’s mandate is to regulate the sector and protect migrant workers, not simply to send people abroad, and listed recent additions:
- Housing loans of Rs. 500,000 to Rs. 1 million for registered migrant workers who have returned to Sri Lanka
- A planned concessionary scheme to subsidise interest on those loans
- Insurance compensation for the families of migrant workers who die overseas
He described remittances sent through legal channels as a major support to the economy.
The Daily Mirror is the only verified newsroom to have filed on the address; Newswire carried the Israel denial separately on September 21, but as an aggregator it does not count as independent corroboration.
