A consultant physician who heads a medical professionals’ association says Budget 2027’s failure to give meaningful relief to professionals could accelerate the departure of doctors from Sri Lanka.

Dr. Chamal Sanjeewa, President of the Medical Professionals’ Alliance for Medical and Civil Rights, said the budget made no substantial allocation for developing the education and healthcare sectors, and that the relief offered to professionals remained minimal, the Daily Mirror reported on Friday morning, the day after the budget was presented.

What he says is missing

Professionals, and doctors in particular, did not receive the salary increases, improved allowances, vehicle permits or better hardship and transport allowances they had expected, Sanjeewa said.

He argued that this could push more young doctors and consultant physicians to seek work abroad, particularly with salaries continuing to fall behind the rising cost of living.

Beyond pay, he criticised the budget for lacking a clear strategy to attract domestic or foreign investment, or to build an innovation-driven economy, and said the deteriorating economic situation could further discourage professionals from staying. He added that the government had failed to complete several programmes the Ministry of Health began in 2024, and that the budget introduced no practical new proposals to address existing problems in health and education.

He said 2027 and 2028 could be particularly difficult years for professionals, with the country at risk of losing more of its skilled workforce.

An affiliation the filing does not mention

Readers should weigh one piece of context the Daily Mirror’s report omits.

A specialist doctor of the same name, Dr. Chamal Sanjeewa, resigned as the Samagi Jana Balawegaya’s Ratmalana electoral organiser in April 2026 while explicitly retaining his seat on the SJB Working Committee and his role as a municipal councillor. The SJB is the main opposition party.

The name and the profession match. This desk has not independently confirmed that the two are the same person, and the Daily Mirror filing describes Sanjeewa only by his association role. If they are the same person, a budget critique presented as coming from a professional body is also coming from a sitting member of the opposition’s governing committee — a disclosure the filing does not make, and one that bears on how the criticism should be read. We report it as an unresolved match rather than an established fact.

The substance, independent of who is speaking

The underlying claim is not novel and does not depend on the speaker. Emigration of health professionals is a documented and measured problem: the World Bank has reported on skilled migration and brain drain from Sri Lanka, and this desk has covered a shortage of psychiatrists attributed to departures.

Professional dissatisfaction with the tax and pay settlement also predates this budget. The GMOA and allied professional bodies pressed in early November for tax to be assessed on gross rather than net income, and the GMOA held islandwide hospital protests at the start of the month. On the day this article was written, public service engineers were on a symbolic strike saying the budget gave them no relief — the same complaint from a different profession.

What the budget did contain for this constituency is set out in our reports on the income tax thresholds and brackets, public sector pay and allowances and health capital spending. Readers can compare those measures against the claim that relief was minimal; this article does not adjudicate between them.

Sourcing

A single-source report. Checks of the Hiru News rail, the NewsFirst homepage payload and the EconomyNext rail on Friday found no other verified newsroom carrying Sanjeewa’s statement. The Daily Mirror filing carries a reporter byline.

Not reported

The filing gives no figures — no count of doctors who have left, no salary comparison with destination countries, and no membership number for the Medical Professionals’ Alliance for Medical and Civil Rights, a body that does not appear in this desk’s previous coverage. It does not say where the remarks were made, whether at a press conference or in a statement, and carries no government response. No GMOA or other medical trade union is quoted.