Around 89 bus route permits will be awarded in November under a revised selection process approved by the Cabinet, Deputy Minister of Transport and Highways Prasanna Gunasena said.
The National Transport Commission will drop its previous issuance methods and instead choose recipients through public advertisements and explicit scoring criteria, EconomyNext reported.
“In that, we have established a scoring procedure. Through that, most likely for around 89 bus permits, we believe we will be able to award them within the month of November by publishing newspaper advertisements and adhering to the due procurement process,” Gunasena said.
A Cabinet paper was approved to set the selection criteria and the procurement procedure. The Deputy Minister said the new system applies to the NTC directly, as provincial council transport falls outside his ministry’s remit — so it governs inter-provincial routes rather than all bus permits in the country.
A separate change to how fares are set
The government is also revising how passenger fares are calculated. Setting ticket prices on fuel costs alone creates financial risk for private operators and for state-linked bodies including the Sri Lanka Transport Board and Metro, Gunasena said.
“When determining bus fares, we intend to switch to a formula we are preparing that factors in all the costs of bus maintenance, spare parts, and all those associated prices,” he said.
No timetable was given for the fare formula, and it is at a preparatory stage. It should not be read as taking effect alongside the November permit awards.
The fleet behind the policy
The changes come with the active fleet constrained. Daily private bus operations have fallen to between 11,000 and 12,000 vehicles after many owners sold their buses during the COVID-19 crisis under financial pressure.
The SLTB runs about 5,000 buses daily out of roughly 7,130 registered, accounting for around a third of the island’s public transport service — meaning close to 2,100 of its registered buses are not in daily service.
Not reported
The filing does not set out what the scoring criteria actually measure, which routes the 89 permits cover, how many permits were issued under the previous method, or what was wrong with it. It gives no date for the newspaper advertisements and no appeal mechanism for unsuccessful applicants.
A note on sourcing: no other verified newsroom had filed on the 89-permit award at the time of writing. Ada Derana carried a report on the SLTB fleet figures from the same remarks, but its pages return an access block to this desk and could not be fetched or date-verified, so it is not cited.
