The government is working to cut the delays investors face when state land is allocated to major projects, and to build a separate concession package for investment outside Colombo, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake told Parliament in the 2027 Budget speech.
A committee of officials has been appointed by the Cabinet of Ministers to handle both questions, EconomyNext reported.
The committee’s remit, in the President’s words, is “to minimize the delays that occur when allocating state land, and to submit recommendations for the concessions that should be granted based on the national importance of the project.”
The regional argument
Dissanayake framed the measure as an attempt to close the gap between an urban-centred economy and the rest of the country, and put the case in plain terms.
“If someone investing in Colombo and someone investing in Jaffna or Polonnaruwa have the exact same privileges and concessions, they prefer to invest in Colombo,” he said.
The remedy proposed is to stop treating incentives as uniform across the island:
“If they invest in outstation provinces, looking at the scale of the investment, the number of jobs generated, and the region where the investment is carried out, we are working to provide a special concession package to those investors.”
“Only if that happens will we be able to push this Colombo urban-centered economy out to the villages,” he said.
How it fits the wider investment package
EconomyNext’s overview of the Budget describes the same machinery from the delivery side: a Treasury-owned investment promotion company, wholly state-held, alongside a dedicated officials’ committee to fast-track state land allocations for strategic ventures. The overview also records a 200 percent enhanced capital allowance for Board of Investment–approved export manufacturing and tourism projects above US$3 million.
Read together, the land measure is the supply side of an FDI push whose other components this desk has covered separately — including four offshore oil and gas blocks in the Mannar Basin, industrial estates and minerals and concessional credit schemes.
It is distinct from the Budget’s land records measures — Rs 800 million for Bimsaviya titling and Rs 140 million for digitisation, reported here. That programme is about proving who owns land; this one is about how quickly the state can hand its own land to a project. The two were announced in the same Budget but are separate instruments, and should not be conflated.
Not reported
The filing attaches no figures to the measure — no allocation for the committee or the promotion company, no target for how far allocation times should fall, and no baseline for how long state land allocation currently takes.
It does not name the committee’s members or chair, give the date of the Cabinet appointment, or set a deadline for its recommendations. Crucially, it does not say what the outstation concession package would contain — whether tax holidays, duty waivers, land at reduced cost, or some combination — or which provinces would qualify. The scale, jobs and region criteria are stated as factors to be weighed, not as a published formula.
Sourcing note: this report rests on a single verified newsroom. A keyword sweep of the Daily Mirror breaking rail and the Hiru News rail found no separate filing on the land-allocation or regional-concession measures, which were not among the Budget sub-topics other outlets led with. The investment promotion company and capital allowance details come from a second EconomyNext filing — the same newsroom, so they corroborate the account but do not independently confirm it.
