The printing of 673,000 driving licences has been halted outright because the Department of Motor Traffic has run short of both printing machines and blank cards, the Commissioner General of Motor Traffic has told a ministerial committee.

Air Vice Marshal Thushara Fernando gave the figure to the Ministerial Consultative Committee on Transport, Highways and Urban Development, NewsFirst reported on Saturday morning.

He said the department’s existing stock of one million cards is expected to be exhausted by January, while the first batch of two million cards under a new supply contract is not scheduled to arrive until the end of March next year. To bridge the gap, he proposed seeking Cabinet approval to buy a further 500,000 cards from the existing supplier, enough to cover the next two months.

The backlog, he said, is expected to be cleared by the middle of next year.

Separately, about 450,000 vehicle number plates remain unissued, also for want of stock.

The backlog has barely moved in a fortnight

This is the number worth holding onto.

On 2 October, departmental officials told Parliament’s Sectoral Oversight Committee on Infrastructure and Strategic Development that 678,000 licences were awaiting printing — and that the queue was still growing, because daily printing capacity of roughly 4,600 licences was not enough to keep pace with demand.

Fifteen days later the figure stands at 673,000. The backlog has fallen by about 5,000, or less than 1%.

At the capacity described to the October committee, the department should have printed on the order of 69,000 licences in that period. The backlog is a net figure — new applications keep arriving — so the two numbers do not reconcile directly. But a queue that officials expected to keep growing has instead flatlined, which is what a stoppage looks like from the outside.

It also answers a question we flagged on Thursday

The 2 October testimony carried a specific commitment: two new printing machines were to be installed by 15 October, lifting daily capacity from about 4,600 to roughly 8,200 licences — close to double.

When the Commissioner General warned the public about licence brokers on 16 October, that deadline had just passed and no filing said whether the machines had arrived. This article recorded the gap at the time.

Saturday’s answer is that printing is halted in part because of a shortage of printing machines. Whatever became of the 15 October installation, the department is describing machine capacity as a live constraint two days after the date it was promised to be solved. No filing says whether the two machines were delivered, installed, commissioned, or ordered at all.

A million cards in stock, and a card shortage

The filing contains a tension it does not resolve.

Printing is said to be halted partly for want of blank cards — yet the same remarks describe an existing stock of one million cards, a figure comfortably larger than the 673,000 licences waiting to be printed.

Two readings are available and NewsFirst does not distinguish them. The “existing stock” may be a previously placed order still being drawn down rather than cards physically on hand, in which case the shortage is one of delivery. Or the stock may be committed to other purposes. Neither is stated. The distinction matters, because it is the difference between a procurement failure and a logistics one.

What the queue produces

The backlog is not an administrative statistic in isolation. It is the demand side of a market the department is simultaneously trying to shut down.

On Friday the same Commissioner General urged applicants to stop paying brokers, warning that those who do end up holding forgeries, and announced a joint programme with police to keep brokers out of the Narahenpita and Werahera offices. In April, two men were arrested over a forged licence racket run out of Werahera, one of them a security officer at the department itself, found with nine official security stickers.

A wait that officials now expect to run until mid-2027 is the condition that makes a broker’s offer worth paying for.

On the number plates

The 450,000 pending plates sit against two earlier commitments. On 2 October officials said plates were being issued within 14 days for vehicles registered after 10 March 2026 — a claim about new registrations that says nothing about the accumulated queue. In September the department undertook to clear the plate backlog within six months, a window that expires in March 2027.

Not reported

NewsFirst gives no reason for the card and machine shortage — no account of why a supply contract for two million cards lands only at the end of March, when the current stock runs out in January, leaving a gap of roughly two months that the proposed 500,000-card purchase is designed to cover. It does not say when the new contract was awarded, to whom, at what price, or why the existing supplier is being approached separately.

It does not say what happens to an applicant whose licence cannot be printed — whether a temporary permit is valid, or whether they may drive at all. It gives no figure for how many people in the 673,000 are renewals versus first-time applicants.

It also does not report whether the committee accepted the mid-2027 timeline, what it instructed, or whether the 45-day report the oversight committee ordered on 2 October — due around 16 November — has been affected. The two committees are different bodies: a ministerial consultative committee is not the sectoral oversight committee that ordered the probe.

This article rests on a single verified source. A search of the other verified newsrooms returned only their coverage of the 2 October backlog figure, with no same-day filing on these remarks.

Source: NewsFirst.