Sri Lanka’s Cabinet has approved amending the Ayurveda Act No. 31 of 1961, the statute that has governed the country’s indigenous medicine sector for sixty-five years, to tighten regulation and to formalise the licensing of indigenous medicine exports.
The Legal Draftsman is to be instructed to prepare the amending bill, Hiru News reported at 8.17 p.m. on Tuesday. The proposal was submitted to Cabinet by the Minister of Health and Mass Media.
What the Act covers
The Ayurveda Act provides the official framework for regulating, developing and controlling Sri Lanka’s indigenous medicine sector, which comprises four systems: Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani and Deshiya Chikitsa.
Deshiya Chikitsa is the indigenous Sri Lankan tradition, distinct from the Ayurveda of the classical texts; Siddha is principally practised in the Tamil-speaking north and east; Unani derives from the Graeco-Arabic tradition. One statute covers all four, which is part of why amending it is a substantial undertaking rather than a technical fix.
The stated objectives
Hiru lists four aims for the amendments:
- Carrying out the sector’s functions more efficiently
- Strengthening regulatory activity
- Streamlining the issuing of licences for the export of indigenous medicinal products abroad
- Supporting the achievement of sustainable development goals
The export clause is the substantive change
Of the four, three describe better administration of what already exists. The export licensing provision is the one that would do something new.
Indigenous medicines manufactured in Sri Lanka are products the state registers for domestic use; exporting them requires a licensing route, and the government’s own framing — that the process needs to be “streamlined” — indicates the existing one is slow, unclear or both. A statute drafted in 1961 predates the regulatory regimes that importing countries now apply to herbal and traditional medicines, and an export licence issued under it has to satisfy authorities abroad as well as at home.
That the proposal came from the Health Ministry rather than a trade or industry ministry is consistent with regulation, not promotion, being the lever: the bottleneck is in the licence, and the licence is the health regulator’s to issue.
What this is not
This is approval to draft a bill, not a bill. The Cabinet’s decision instructs the Legal Draftsman to prepare the amending legislation; the draft must then be settled, gazetted and passed by Parliament before anything changes. The 1961 Act remains in force unamended until then.
Sri Lanka’s Ayurveda (Amendment) Act, No. 19 of 2023 already amended the principal statute within the last three years. Readers searching for the law should note that the 1961 Act has been amended before, and that a search returning a 2023 amendment is not returning this one.
Not reported
The filing does not identify which sections of the Act are to be amended, state what the current export licensing process requires, or say how long licences presently take.
Nothing published gives a value for Sri Lanka’s indigenous medicine exports, names the destination markets the change is aimed at, or says whether manufacturers or practitioner bodies were consulted. No timetable is given for the draft, and the filing does not say whether the amendments touch the registration of practitioners or only products.
On sourcing. This is a single-source report from a verified newsroom. Ada Derana has also filed on this decision, at /news/250252 under the headline “Govt. to amend Ayurveda Act”, but adaderana.lk has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for thirty-two consecutive days, so no publication date could be extracted and it could not be cited under this site’s sourcing rules. EconomyNext covered three other decisions from Tuesday’s post-Cabinet briefing but not this one.
Sources: Hiru News — Cabinet approval to amend the Ayurveda Act (Sinhala).
