President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said on Saturday that Sri Lanka cannot digitise the state without dismantling parts of it — some institutions will have to be closed, others merged or given new objectives, and entirely new ones created.
He was addressing the National Trade Union Convention at the P.D. Sirisena Grounds in Colombo, the gathering the governing National People’s Power is holding to mark two years in office.
Meaningful transformation was not possible while the state stayed inside its traditional structures and practices, the President said, according to NewsFirst. He framed the problem as institutional rather than technical: the obstacle is the shape of the organisations, not the availability of the technology.
The pay problem, stated plainly
The most specific part of the address was an admission about public sector salaries. Conventional public service pay scales, the President said, are simply not enough to attract professionals with specialised technical expertise.
That is why GovTech was set up as a separate institution wholly owned by the Treasury, with a different salary structure, rather than as a unit inside an existing ministry — a structure chosen specifically so it could recruit IT specialists the normal scales would not reach.
It is an unusually direct statement of a constraint governments more often leave unsaid, and it carries an implication the address did not spell out: if the pay structure is the binding limit, then every further digitisation body faces the same choice between sitting inside the service and sitting outside it.
Three worked examples
The President used three institutions to illustrate the approach:
| Institution | Problem it was created for |
|---|---|
| GovTech | Building state digital capability; recruiting IT professionals outside public service pay scales |
| Gambling Regulatory Authority | Gambling that was once confined to traditional venues has become a large online business, requiring new law and new regulatory machinery |
| Metro | Modernising public transport, including the transformation of the existing bus fleet |
Each, in his account, required not just a new mandate but new salary structures and a new organisational culture.
What is still to come
Dissanayake said the government intends to introduce a Digital Economy Bill and establish a Digital Economy Authority to support the shift to a digitally driven economy.
That Authority is not a new announcement. When Sri Lanka wound down the ICT Agency after 23 years in April, the plan was to replace it with two bodies — GovTech for government digitisation and a Digital Economy Authority for broader policy, backed by US$125 million from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank over four years plus Rs. 2 billion from the Treasury. GovTech now exists. The Authority still does not, and Saturday’s remarks identify the Bill as the instrument that would create it.
He also called on the business community to move away from traditional practices, and said the government was putting the necessary laws and institutions in place to drive the process.
Context on the named bodies
Our own coverage records that the company behind the Metro buses is Lanka Metro Transit, incorporated on 3 October 2025 under the Companies Act No. 07 of 2007, which began Colombo urban transit pilot operations with 10 low-floor buses. NewsFirst’s filing refers to it only as “Metro”.
On gambling, the regulatory gap the President described is one the state has been working at from the enforcement end: the telecoms regulator has been blocking unlicensed online gambling sites through 2026, and the shift of betting online has been identified as a source of tax leakage.
The rest of the speech
The same address produced the government’s signal of further PAYE relief in the 2027 Budget and its pledge that the terrorism and organised crime Bills will not go to a vote without public consultation. Hiru News reported a further passage in which the President said the National People’s Power does not need repressive laws to govern, and that if the public wanted an election the government was ready to face one.
Not reported
NewsFirst gives no timetable for the Digital Economy Bill, no date for the Authority, and does not name any institution slated for closure, merger or restructuring — the central claim of the address is made entirely in the abstract. It does not say how many posts GovTech has filled under its separate salary structure, what that structure pays, or what it costs. No trade union response to the restructuring proposal is recorded, which is notable given the venue.
