The Cabinet has approved a school stationery allowance of Rs. 6,000 each for 1.5 million schoolchildren for the 2027 school year, the Daily Mirror reported.
The allowance is delivered two ways. One million children from families enrolled in the Aswesuma welfare programme receive it as a direct bank transfer. A further 500,000 children identified by the Ministry of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education receive vouchers worth Rs. 6,000 each.
The proposal was submitted by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake in his capacity as Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development. The programme has been running since 2025.
The figure no filing gives
At Rs. 6,000 a child across 1.5 million children, the 2027 allowance commits Rs. 9 billion. Neither the Daily Mirror’s report nor the other filings on Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting state the total.
That is worth setting beside the scheme it is routed through. The Aswesuma first phase drew Rs. 9.12 billion in October for 985,283 families. The stationery allowance is, in a single annual payment, roughly the size of one month of the country’s main means-tested cash transfer.
The delivery route has a moving denominator
Two-thirds of the allowance is paid through Aswesuma bank accounts, which makes the size of the Aswesuma register the operative eligibility list for most recipients. That register is shrinking: the first-phase caseload fell by 13,770 families between September and October, about thirty times the previous month’s attrition, and recipients blocked since 2023 have until 29 October to file missing documents or be struck off.
Cabinet has fixed the recipient count at one million Aswesuma children for 2027. Whether that number survives contact with a register still being pruned is not addressed in the filing. The 500,000 non-Aswesuma children are identified separately by the Education Ministry, which gives the government a discretionary channel outside the means test.
Why the programme exists
The government’s own account of the scheme’s launch, published by the state news agency news.lk when the allowance was introduced for the 2025 school year, grounds it in the Department of Census and Statistics’ Household Survey on the Impact of the Economic Crisis – 2023. That survey found 55% of schoolchildren adversely affected by the crisis, with the share higher in rural and estate areas; 53.2% of affected children had reduced or stopped buying school stationery and 26.1% were re-using old stationery. The first round was paid into Aswesuma accounts by 27 December 2024.
That page describes the 2025 launch, not Tuesday’s decision, and is cited here for the programme’s origin only — it is not a source for the 2027 approval and is not listed below.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror does not give the total cost, say when in 2027 the allowance will be paid, or explain how the 500,000 non-Aswesuma children are identified or by what criteria. It does not say whether Rs. 6,000 has been uprated for inflation since the programme began in 2025 — on the figures available it has not — or how many children received it in 2026.
Ada Derana carried the same decision under the headline “Cabinet approves Rs. 6,000 stationery allowance for 1.5 mln schoolchildren in 2027.” Its article could not be read: the site has returned a CloudFront block to every fetch attempt for several weeks, so it is not cited here.
Source: Daily Mirror.
