Parliament’s Committee on Public Finance has reviewed progress on the drafting of a new Procurement Act, with delays in buying pharmaceuticals and other essential goods singled out for detailed discussion.
The committee met this week and set out its findings in a statement from the legislature, EconomyNext reported on Thursday.
What the committee identified
The CoPF named four problem areas in the existing process: delays in procurement operations, problems in the registration process, deficiencies in the legal framework, and operational difficulties in using the digital systems. The statement said the necessity of minimising delays when purchasing pharmaceuticals and other essential goods “was thoroughly discussed.”
Three remedies were put to the committee:
- raising the financial thresholds at which procurement committees can act
- a long-term framework agreement system for repetitive purchases
- sector-specific procurement guidelines
The last of these matches what the President described in his own procurement address on 13 October, where he argued a single template built for buying physical goods cannot serve software systems, defence-equipment repair or airline purchasing. The committee is now working on the legislative form of that idea.
PROMIS, and how far it reaches
The committee also assessed the Procurement Management Information System (PROMIS), the platform intended to digitise procurement. It is currently monitoring procedures across 394 active procurement units covering 19 ministries, with plans to extend it to all provincial councils and government departments by 2027.
The spending record behind it
The review runs against a capital budget that is badly under-spent: about Rs. 385 billion of the Rs. 1,380 billion allocated this year, or 28%. This desk reported those figures on 12 October; they are background to this filing rather than new disclosure, as are the President’s remarks EconomyNext recaps from last week, including his admission that successive governments stacked “layer upon layer of regulations” until rules became “so restrictive that nothing can get done.”
EconomyNext reports that analysts and economists attribute the chronic under-utilisation to structural inefficiencies in public financial management and project execution, and warn of weaker future growth if planned capital projects go undelivered. The government’s standing answer, repeated here, is that most spending falls in the final quarter.
Not reported
No timetable is given for the new Act — no drafting deadline, no date for tabling it in Parliament. The statement does not say which ministries the 394 units sit in, how many units exist outside those 19 ministries, or what the pharmaceutical delays have cost. The CoPF’s chair and the officials who appeared before it are not named.
Single-source. EconomyNext attributes the account to a statement by Parliament, but this desk could not locate that statement on parliament.lk, whose news and committee-news listings did not surface it. No other verified newsroom had filed on the meeting at the time of writing.