Cabinet has approved an estimated Rs. 180 million project to build baseline maps of Sri Lanka’s groundwater, intended to give the Water Resources Board the data it needs to license extraction and enforce the law, Cabinet spokesman Minister Nalinda Jayatissa said.
The programme runs for three years from 2027 and covers five districts: Kurunegala, Anuradhapura, Gampaha, Jaffna and Hambantota, EconomyNext reported.
The problem being solved is a records problem
The case for the project is less about a shortage of data than about data that cannot be used.
Records held by the Water Resources Board have accumulated over many years but are “largely fragmented” and lack systematic geo-referencing — meaning the Board cannot place its own measurements on a map, and so cannot run spatial analysis or manage the resource across an area.
“There is a pressing need for a structured, reliable, and scientifically grounded groundwater information system to support informed, long-term sustainable decision-making.”
What the maps are meant to enable
Once complete, the system is intended to support the Board in four regulatory functions:
- water extraction licensing
- resource assessment
- law enforcement
- national policy implementation
That list is the substance of the decision. Without geo-referenced baselines, a licensing regime cannot say how much water a given aquifer can yield or whether a particular withdrawal is sustainable — which makes the mapping a precondition for regulation rather than a research exercise.
Why now
Jayatissa cited three pressures on underground supplies: contamination of sources, rising demand, and shifts in rainfall and recharge patterns driven by climate change.
The five districts span very different groundwater conditions — the North Western and North Central dry-zone agricultural belts around Kurunegala and Anuradhapura, the densely populated Gampaha district in the Western Province, the limestone aquifer system of the Jaffna peninsula, and the dry southeastern coast at Hambantota. EconomyNext does not report the criteria used to select them.
Context
The decision follows earlier moves to bring groundwater extraction under tighter control, including new rules for commercial extraction overseen by the Water Resources Board, and sits alongside separate work on surface supply such as the three desalination projects announced by the NWSDB.
It is distinct from the drought and dry-spell reporting that dominates groundwater coverage in Sri Lanka: this is an infrastructure and regulatory decision, not a response to a current shortage.
What was not reported
EconomyNext does not say who will carry out the mapping, whether the Rs. 180 million is fully domestically funded, what happens in the other 20 districts, or whether the three-year timetable is expected to produce usable maps before 2030.
No other verified newsroom had filed on this particular Cabinet decision at the time of writing, though several carried other decisions from the same briefing.