President Anura Kumara Dissanayake told officials on Tuesday to complete the development work raising passenger capacity at Katunayake International Airport “expeditiously”, during the Ports and Civil Aviation Ministry’s 2027 budget discussion at the Presidential Secretariat.
The meeting was held on Tuesday afternoon and chaired by the President, Hiru News reported shortly after midnight.
The President’s instruction covered projects already under way whose stated aims are to raise passenger capacity at Katunayake and to deliver a more efficient and convenient service to travellers. He did not, in the account reported, set a deadline or name a specific project.
He also reviewed progress on capacity projects at the island’s other airports, and said that work should be carried out in line with future demand and the country’s development goals.
What is already under way at Katunayake
The instruction lands on a programme this desk has been tracking. In September, Terminal 1 expansion work began at Bandaranaike International Airport, with contractor Maga Engineering mobilising for a one-year build adding 36 new check-in counters, aimed at a throughput of 10 million passengers a year.
Tuesday’s remarks are consistent with that work continuing into the 2027 budget year, though the filing does not link the President’s instruction to Terminal 1 specifically.
Not reported
Hiru does not name the other airports whose projects were reviewed, give any budget figure or allocation for the ministry, identify which officials or ministers attended, or state which projects are behind schedule — the implicit premise of an instruction to move faster. No completion date is given for any project mentioned.
Longer-range capacity figures for Katunayake have been published previously in connection with a thirty-year masterplan, but those come from reporting earlier in 2026 and were not part of Tuesday’s meeting as reported. They are not repeated here.
Single-newsroom. Pre-budget ministry reviews are routinely covered by several outlets, and a search of the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing, the NewsFirst rail, EconomyNext, news.lk, the Daily FT and the Sunday Times found no other verified newsroom reporting this particular meeting at the time of writing. The Island carried a related pre-budget item but was unreachable — the site returned a database error through one route and a bot challenge through the other. Ada Derana has returned HTTP 403 to this desk for more than six weeks.
