Five thousand houses built with government assistance are to be handed over to the public on Monday to mark World Habitat Day, Housing, Construction and Water Supply Minister Dr. H.M. Susil Ranasinghe said.
He was speaking at a media briefing at the Government Information Department, Newswire reported.
This year’s World Habitat Day programme will be held on 5 October under the theme “A Safe Home for All”, with Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya as chief guest. A Habitat Week will be held across the country alongside it.
The year’s target
The government’s target is 30,000 houses by 31 December, the Minister said, with the stated aim of providing a safe home for every person. Low-income families will be given priority in allocation.
Each house built with community participation will be a fully equipped 550-square-foot home.
The specific allocations
The briefing set out several separate funding lines:
- Rs. 2 million per house for families in the Northern and Eastern provinces who lost their homes in the war.
- Rs. 1.5 million per house under the “Yathiwara Ma Piya” programme.
- Rs. 2 million for each safe home built for children in institutional care.
- Rs. 5 million to each family that lost its home completely to Cyclone Ditwah.
- Rs. 500 million for housing loans to government employees, with the government covering four percentage points of the interest charged.
- Bank loans of up to Rs. 10 million at 15% interest for migrant workers, with the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment meeting part of the interest.
The Ditwah figure is the largest per-family amount announced, and is the only one tied to a specific disaster rather than to a category of beneficiary.
Not reported
The Minister did not say how many of the 5,000 houses fall under each programme, where they are located, how many have been completed against the 30,000 target so far, or how the 5,000 will be distributed across districts. No breakdown of the Rs. 500 million employee loan allocation was given, and no figure was given for the number of families still awaiting houses under the war-damage or Ditwah categories.
This account rests on a single outlet’s report of the briefing. No verified newsroom’s own filing on it could be located at the time of writing, and a Hiru News item carrying the same headline could not be cited because the link the site itself publishes for it does not resolve.
Context
World Habitat Day falls on the first Monday of October, and Sri Lanka has marked it with housing handovers in previous years under different ministers and different figures. The numbers here — 5,000 houses handed over, a 30,000 target by 31 December, and the “A Safe Home for All” theme — belong to the 2026 observance and should not be read against earlier editions.