Sri Lanka’s Cabinet has approved publishing a draft Public-Private Partnership bill in the Government Gazette before it is submitted to Parliament, clearing the last administrative step before a PPP law reaches the legislature.
The decision was announced by Cabinet Spokesman and Minister Nalinda Jayatissa at the weekly post-Cabinet media briefing, EconomyNext reported at 3.09 p.m. on Tuesday.
Where the bill already stands
Two steps that usually consume months are already complete. The Legal Draftsman has drafted the bill, and the Attorney General has granted legal clearance for it. Gazetting is the publication requirement that precedes tabling, which means the draft is procedurally ready rather than at the concept stage.
What the law would create
The central institutional change is a National Agency for PPP. Jayatissa said it would facilitate, advise, coordinate, monitor and assist in executing partnership projects “across all sectors of the economy” — a single body where responsibility currently sits in no one place.
The bill is drafted to establish a statutory framework covering the whole life of a project: “identifying, formulating, evaluating, approving, procuring, implementing, monitoring, and concluding Public-Private Partnership projects,” the spokesman said.
Three further elements were specified:
- Competitive procurement. The bill includes “establishing a transparent, competitive procurement framework to select private partners in accordance with procurement guidelines issued by the National Procurement Commission.”
- Integration with public investment rules. PPP projects would be folded into the public investment management framework established under the Public Financial Management Act.
- Fiscal discipline. The stated objectives include ensuring consistency across project approval and monitoring processes.
The government’s own diagnosis
The most direct passage in the briefing was Jayatissa’s account of why previous attempts failed.
“As you can see, although we have attempted this intermittently in our history, we were never able to carry out Public-Private Partnerships at the speed and efficiency that we and the country required,” he said. “That was due to transparency issues, inter-agency friction, institutional coordination problems, and several other bottlenecks.”
That is an unusually specific admission, and it maps onto the bill’s structure. Inter-agency friction and coordination problems are what a single national agency is meant to answer; transparency issues are what the competitive-procurement clause is meant to answer. The remedies are addressed to the named faults rather than offered in the abstract.
“This bill is being drafted to place public-private partnerships on a much more structured and formalized footing,” Jayatissa said.
Why the procurement clause is the clause to watch
Sri Lanka’s recent record on partnership projects has turned less on the absence of a law than on how partners were chosen. This desk reported on 19 October that the Ports Authority scrapped a joint venture in which a foreign partner held a majority stake, and moved instead to a tender. The bill’s requirement that private partners be selected under National Procurement Commission guidelines is the provision that would make a competitive process the default rather than a decision taken case by case.
Not reported
The filing does not say when the bill will be gazetted or tabled, what thresholds trigger the new framework, or whether existing partnership projects would be brought under it.
Nothing published states how the National Agency for PPP would be constituted, who would appoint its officers, what powers it would hold over line ministries, or whether it replaces or sits alongside any existing body. The bill’s treatment of unsolicited proposals — historically the route by which the least competitive projects have arrived — is not described. No clause numbers have been published.
Sources: EconomyNext — Cabinet nods for PPP bill to boost investments, Lanka Business Online — Government moves to pass Public-Private Partnership Bill.
Update — a second newsroom, and who actually proposed it
Lanka Business Online has filed its own account of the decision, confirming the substance above and adding three facts EconomyNext’s filing did not carry.
The proposer. EconomyNext attributed the announcement to Cabinet Spokesman Nalinda Jayatissa, which is where the briefing came from, not where the paper came from. LBO reports the proposal was submitted by the President in his capacity as Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development. A PPP framework arriving as a Finance Ministry paper under the President’s own hand, rather than from a line ministry, places it in the economic-reform programme rather than in any sector’s capital pipeline.
This is the second approval, not the first. The bill follows an initial Cabinet approval granted on 2 June 2025, which sought a comprehensive legal framework for partnerships. The drafting and Attorney General’s clearance described above happened in the roughly sixteen months between the two decisions — so the “procedurally ready rather than at the concept stage” reading is confirmed, with a timeline attached.
The decision date. LBO reports the approval was announced in the Cabinet media statement issued on 19 October, subject to confirmation at the next meeting. Tuesday’s briefing communicated a decision taken the previous day — the ordinary sequence for Sri Lankan Cabinet decisions, and a reminder that the briefing date and the decision date are not the same.
This replaces the single-source note that previously stood here. The two accounts do not conflict on any point.
