Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya has instructed officials to clear Colombo District’s canals and drainage systems within two weeks, and to maintain them regularly afterwards, Hiru News reported on Tuesday. She gave the direction at the Colombo District Coordinating Committee meeting at the Narahenpita District Secretariat, citing expected increases in rainfall.
The officials in the room said they cannot easily do it
The same meeting heard why the work has not been done already. Representatives of the Divisional Secretariat offices, the Department of Agrarian Development and the Provincial Irrigation Department set out the difficulties they face in cleaning drains and canals, naming a shortage of technical officers and problems preparing plans and estimates.
That is an unusually direct account of a constraint being raised in the same session as the deadline. Nothing in the report indicates that additional technical officers, funding or procurement relief was offered in response, or that the two-week timeframe was revised after the officials spoke.
The deadline falls after the rain it is meant to prepare for
The sequence around this order matters, and no filing sets it out.
Colombo’s main roads went under water on Monday — Sri Sangaraja Mawatha, Kinsey Road, Panchikawatta Road and part of Baseline Road — with landslide warnings in force for seven districts and Colombo among them. On Tuesday morning the Department of Meteorology forecast 100–150 mm of rain in parts of five provinces, the Western Province included.
The Prime Minister’s instruction was reported on Tuesday afternoon. Two weeks from Tuesday is roughly 27 October — which places the completion date well beyond the rainfall already forecast for this week. The order is a response to flooding that has started rather than a measure in place before it.
This is a different meeting from the Clean Colombo review
This should not be confused with the Clean Colombo progress review held at the Presidential Secretariat on 9 October, which was chaired by Secretary to the President Dr. Nandika Sanath Kumanayake and brought together six implementing agencies including the Colombo Municipal Council, the Urban Development Authority and Sri Lanka Railways.
Tuesday’s meeting is the district coordinating committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, working through divisional secretariats and provincial bodies. The two forums cover overlapping ground — canal and drainage rehabilitation appears in both — but they are separate structures, and neither report refers to the other.
What else the committee covered
The meeting also reviewed Colombo District’s 2026 development programme.
- Rural roads — the 2026 programme runs in three phases across several divisional secretariat divisions. Projects begun in 2025 in Thimbirigasyaya, Kolonnawa and Seethawaka have been completed.
- Poverty alleviation — under the Praja Shakthi national programme, Rs. 1,117.53 million was allocated for 2026, of which Rs. 1,108.00 million was directed across thirteen divisional secretariat divisions to supply equipment for agriculture, freshwater fisheries and small businesses.
- Disaster mitigation — river cleaning and pathway development in Homagama, Seethawaka and Maharagama.
- Sports — funding for school and public playgrounds, reported as Rs. 300,000 distributed across 39 divisional secretariat divisions, upgrading grounds in Dehiwala, Maharagama, Homagama and Thimbirigasyaya.
Three things in the figures that do not reconcile
The decentralised capital budget numbers are internally consistent. Officials reported 281 projects approved for 184,775 beneficiary families, with a total allocation of Rs. 217.38 million made up of Rs. 180 million in member allocations and Rs. 37.38 million in national-list member allocations. Those two components sum exactly to the stated total.
Three other points do not resolve on the face of the report:
- The total estimated cost of those projects is given as Rs. 217.03 million, against the Rs. 217.38 million allocated — about Rs. 350,000 more allocated than the projects are estimated to cost. Small, but the two figures are near-identical and easy to read as the same number.
- Praja Shakthi’s Rs. 1,117.53 million allocation and the Rs. 1,108.00 million directed to divisions differ by Rs. 9.53 million, with no account of the balance.
- The report places Praja Shakthi spending across thirteen divisional secretariat divisions and sports funding across thirty-nine. Both are described as divisions of the same district. The report does not reconcile the two counts, and Rs. 300,000 shared among 39 divisions would come to under Rs. 8,000 each, which suggests the figure is per division or per ground rather than a total. This desk cannot resolve which from the filing.
Sourcing
Hiru News is the only verified newsroom this desk could read on the meeting. Ada Derana also filed on it, under the headline “PM directs officials to complete canal and drainage cleaning in Colombo within two weeks”, and its article identifier places it on 13 October; the site has been returning a CloudFront block for over three weeks, so the report could not be read and is not cited. A check of the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing returned nothing on the meeting, news.lk’s current-affairs listing carried no release on it, and NewsFirst had not filed. The account appears to originate with the Prime Minister’s Media Division.
Two other results that look like this story are not: an Island report of the Prime Minister on Colombo flooding is from a Colombo District Disaster Management Committee meeting on 9 December and refers to a cyclone, and a news.lk item on a Colombo District emergency hotline is dated 27 November 2025. Both are different meetings in different years.
Not reported
Hiru does not say which agency is responsible for completing the work, how many canals or kilometres of drain are covered, whether any funding accompanies the two-week deadline, or what happens if it is missed. Nothing is reported on how the shortage of technical officers will be addressed, who else attended, or whether the Colombo Municipal Council — the main drainage authority in the city and a named Clean Colombo implementer — was represented.
