Justice and National Integration Minister Harshana Nanayakkara says a mechanism has been introduced to bring delays in issuing Government Analyst’s reports down to three months by 31 January 2027.
He was speaking on Friday (16) during an inspection visit to the Government Analyst’s Department at Battaramulla, where he reviewed progress on reports relating to narcotic substances, the Daily Mirror reported. He examined sample processing, the computerisation of reports and measures to speed their issuance.
The first date attached to the promise
This matters because it is the first time a target in this saga has carried a calendar date. The commitments before it were open-ended or expressed as rates.
In August, Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala said arrangements had been made to complete 9,000 delayed reports within the month. Later that month Nanayakkara gave a six-week timeline for easing overcrowding, describing output of 400 to 500 reports a day after recruiting 70 officers and buying three analysis machines. In October he published the first hard output figures — 9,061 drug reports in August and 8,445 in September, a month-on-month fall of 616 that he did not address.
Against that record, “three months by 31 January” is a measurable claim. It is also a narrower one: it describes the time a report takes, not the size of the arrears.
What has actually been cleared
Officials told the minister that reports on narcotic samples weighing less than five grams, received up to August 2026, had been completed, and that work on the remainder had been accelerated.
That is a precise and quite limited statement. It covers the smallest samples only, and stops at August. Nothing in the filing says what proportion of the department’s drug caseload falls under five grams, or how far behind the larger-sample reports are running.
Why the delay matters
A narcotics prosecution generally cannot proceed until the analyst’s report reaches court, so delays leave unconvicted suspects in remand. Nanayakkara said timely issuance was essential both to expedite proceedings and to ease prison overcrowding — in a system holding some 39,000 inmates, with around 23,000 drug-case prisoners on remand awaiting reports by his own August account. Drugs account for about 70% of the department’s reports.
The minister attributed past delays to staff shortages and facility limits, and listed the remedies as filling vacancies, upgrading facilities and paying allowances for night-shift staff.
The department still has no permanent head
Present at the inspection was Acting Government Analyst Kamini Perera — rendered Kamani Perera in this desk’s August coverage, where she already held the post in an acting capacity. Two months on, the state forensic laboratory is still being run by an acting head, a fact no filing comments on.
Parliament takes up the Second Reading of two Bills amending the Poisons, Opium and Dangerous Drugs Ordinance on 22 October.
Not reported
The filing does not say what the new mechanism consists of, what the current average delay is, or how many reports remain outstanding — so there is no baseline against which the January target can be measured.
