The government has set aside Rs 1,000 million in the 2027 Budget to upgrade the mobile application built to help fishermen locate fish, Deputy Minister of Fisheries, Aquatic and Ocean Resources Rathna Gamage told Parliament on Friday.
Gamage made the announcement during the Budget debate, the Daily Mirror reported. Hiru News carried the same remarks with a direct quote.
Answering the opposition
The Deputy Minister was responding to opposition politicians who had said the promised platform was never delivered.
“The opposition raised a point here asking where the app is. The app exists. There is an app in this country to find fish,” Gamage said, according to Hiru’s Sinhala report. “A lakh of fishermen use the app.”
The Daily Mirror put the user base at more than 100,000 fishermen — the same order of magnitude. Hiru’s English headline renders the figure as “hundreds of thousands”, but its own Sinhala text says ලක්ෂයක ප්රමාණයක්, one lakh, or about 100,000. The lower figure is the one both filings actually support.
What the money is for
Gamage said the app’s current limitation is the span of its data. The Daily Mirror reports him saying it provides data covering only three to four days; in Hiru’s quote he describes “a database with a time span of 2–3 days”. The two filings do not agree on the window, and neither reconciles it.
Improving that is what the allocation is meant to pay for. The government is in discussions with several foreign companies and local service providers about the upgrade, he said.
A second Rs 1 billion line, or the same one?
This desk’s report on the fisheries chapter of the Budget records a separate Rs 1 billion allocation for resource management — ocean surveys, habitat mapping, fish stock assessments and ecosystem restoration.
Whether Friday’s Rs 1,000 million is that same line, described by the Deputy Minister in terms of the app it would feed, or a distinct second allocation of the same size, is not stated in any filing seen by this desk. Survey and stock-assessment data is exactly what a fish-finding application would draw on, so the two descriptions are compatible — but compatibility is not confirmation, and the figures should not be added together without better sourcing.
Not reported
Neither filing names the application, says when it was launched, or gives the size of the registered fishing fleet against which 100,000 users could be judged. Neither names the foreign companies or local providers in discussion, gives a timeline for the upgrade, or says what data window the upgrade is meant to achieve.
