The Cabinet has approved a diversification programme for the State Printing Corporation to be delivered through a public-private partnership, Cabinet Spokesman and Media Minister Nalinda Jayatissa said — and he used the announcement to reject, before being pressed on them, the two objections the decision invites: that it amounts to privatisation, and that it puts government printing at a security risk.
EconomyNext reported the decision at 3.36 p.m. on Tuesday.
The case the government makes
Established in 1968, the State Printing Corporation (SPC) is the state’s main printer of school textbooks, official government publications and institutional documents. Jayatissa’s framing is that it is being modernised from a position of profit, not rescued from loss:
“Although the Corporation has consistently recorded financial profits in recent years, challenges regarding production efficiency and cost competitiveness have arisen due to the deterioration of existing machinery and the obsolescence of its printing technology.”
Restructuring both the business model and the technical base is necessary for the corporation’s long-term sustainability, he said. On the funding, the argument is that the SPC cannot carry the re-equipment cost alone, so the state will meet part of it with private assistance:
“We are moving towards a mechanism where this work can be carried out quickly, efficiently, and securely, while placing the minimum possible burden on the Treasury.”
On security, he said printing syllabus-based schoolbooks raises no confidentiality question. On privatisation, he said non-confidential government printing is already put out to open tender. The exact structure is not settled: proposals are to be called to determine it.
The archive supplies the context the filing leaves out
Jayatissa’s “already handled through open tenders” is not a general reassurance. It describes something this desk reported a week earlier, and the sequence is the most informative thing about this decision.
On 6 October, the Cabinet approved contracts worth Rs. 1,614.69 million excluding VAT to 21 printing houses for the school textbooks and modules required in 2027 — 421 types of textbook and module, tendered by the Department of Educational Publications under the National Competitive Procurement Procedure, all to be distributed free to schoolchildren.
So the body described in Tuesday’s decision as the state’s primary printer of school textbooks was not, a week earlier, awarded the 2027 textbook print run. Outside printers were. Read against that award, the stated rationale for the partnership — production efficiency and cost competitiveness — reads less as a forward-looking upgrade than as a response to a position the SPC has already lost on price.
Neither filing connects the two decisions, and no official statement frames them as related. The connection is drawn here from the two Cabinet decisions’ own contents, not from any source’s account of them.
A pattern across one Cabinet sitting
The state printer is the third asset this Cabinet has opened to private operation in a week, alongside a slate the President set out at the Sri Lanka Economic and Investment Summit the previous day:
- the East Container Terminal at Colombo Port, whose management and operating rights are to go to a private partner with the state retaining ownership;
- a container examination facility at Kerawalapitiya, also as a PPP, which the President said already has Cabinet approval;
- and now the SPC.
All three are proceeding while the general statutory framework for managing state assets does not exist. At the same sitting, Cabinet suspended the State Assets Management Bill gazetted in August 2024 and sent a fresh Bill back to the Legal Draftsman — restarting the drafting stage of a law that has been pending for about twenty-six months. Individual transactions are being approved faster than the framework intended to govern them.
Sourcing note
This report rests on a single verified newsroom. The Daily Mirror’s coverage of the same Cabinet briefing ran to at least eight separate filings — the State Assets Management Bill, the Technical Education Director General, disease surveillance, the stationery allowance, the ADB water loan and the Nakolagane sanctuary among them — and carries nothing on the State Printing Corporation. Nor do the Daily FT’s Cabinet filing of 14 October, Lanka Business Online’s Cabinet series, or Hiru News. A domain-restricted search across eight verified outlets returned only older editions, including a Department of Government Printing decision from a previous administration that concerns a different body.
Not reported
What the “diversification programme” actually diversifies into, and whether the SPC’s current work is to be retained. No cost for the re-equipment, no split between the state’s share and the private partner’s, no timetable for calling proposals, and no indication of the partnership’s legal form, duration or revenue arrangement. The filing does not say what the SPC’s recent profits were, what share of government printing it still holds, or what happens to its workforce. No trade-union response is recorded, and the objections Jayatissa pre-emptively answered are not attributed to anyone — so it is not clear who raised them.
