A plan to put 200 electric buses into service for the Sri Lanka Transport Board has produced no buses three years after Cabinet approved it, according to a special audit report whose findings were reported on Sunday. The tender drew ten buyers of the bid documents and exactly one bid — which was then disqualified.
The project was approved in 2023 and centred on the Colombo metropolitan zone and the Gampaha district, Hiru News reported. Its stated aims were to cut fuel imports, reduce air pollution and improve the sustainability of the national public transport fleet.
The audit finds that the Ministry of Transport and the Sri Lanka Transport Board failed to carry it out within the time allowed.
The tender drew one bid
The sequence the report sets out is unusually stark for a procurement of this size.
- Ten bidders bought the request-for-proposals documents.
- One bidder submitted a proposal.
- That single bidder was later disqualified, for failing to furnish a business performance bond.
- The procurement process was terminated on 20 July 2024.
- As at 27 October 2025 — fifteen months later — no step had been taken even to begin work on buying or deploying the buses.
A field of ten that yields one bid is itself a finding. It says either that the specification or the commercial terms deterred nine organisations that had paid to look, or that the evaluation process was not one they expected to be able to win. The audit does not say which.
What the audit blames
The report attributes the collapse to four things: weak procurement control, insufficient rigour in evaluating bidders, the absence of any contingency procurement strategy for a failed tender, and poor coordination between the Ministry of Transport, the Treasury and the SLTB.
The last of these is the one with consequences beyond this purchase. A tender can fail for ordinary reasons; what the audit describes is three institutions that between them could not restart a Cabinet-approved project for more than a year after it stopped.
The findings sit inside a broader special audit on electric vehicle use, end-of-life management and environmental impact in Sri Lanka — so the bus procurement is one case within a wider review, not the subject of the report on its own.
Context
The state bus operator’s fleet renewal has been a recurring subject this year, including a survey of routes for a Kandy metro bus service. The 200 electric buses were intended as the first significant electrification of the SLTB fleet.
Not reported
The filing does not name the body that issued the audit, give the report’s own publication date, or say whether it has been tabled in Parliament or before the Committee on Public Enterprises.
It does not give the project’s budgeted cost, the funding source, the identity of the disqualified bidder, or whether the Ministry of Transport has responded to the findings. Nor does it say whether a fresh tender is now planned.
One limitation should be read with the figures: the audit’s latest stated observation is dated 27 October 2025. Anything done in the year since falls outside the window the report describes, and no filing says whether the position has changed.
Ada Derana also reported the audit’s findings, but the site has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for 42 consecutive days, so no publication date could be extracted and it is named here rather than cited. No other verified newsroom had filed at the time of writing.