Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa told Parliament on Friday that the 2027 Budget “is not a budget”, accusing the government of campaigning on Marxism and governing as neoliberals, in a second-reading speech that ranged across poverty data, the digital economy, debt restructuring and agriculture.
He was speaking on the opening day of the Budget’s second-reading debate, Hiru News reported. The debate runs to 20 November.
The line that gave the filing its headline is a Sinhala pun that does not survive translation: Premadasa said this was not an ayawaya — a budget — but a pacha waya, a spending of falsehoods, and a pacha walak, a string of them. Hiru’s own English rendering is “a bunch of nonsense.”
The central charge
Premadasa’s framing was that the government has inverted its own platform. The President, he said, had followed Marxist politics but brought a budget of neoliberal policy, leaving the administration “isolated between two worlds.”
He noted that this is not the JVP’s first budget — the party had earlier helped craft one in alliance with the United People’s Freedom Alliance, when, he said, it promised to take from the rich and give to the poor, to cut ties with the World Bank and remove the IMF’s presence, and to deliver a “Soora Saradiel budget”, after the Sri Lankan outlaw of folk memory. What has arrived instead, he said, is a budget that “punches the small man in the stomach” — a boxing metaphor he built around Muhammad Ali’s name — while making room for the wealthy.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who holds the finance portfolio, had quoted Buddhist scripture in presenting the Budget. Premadasa answered on the same ground, citing the Chakkavatti Sihanada Sutta on governance and taxation and arguing that measured against it the Budget loads hardship onto the public.
The inequality figures, and what the published data says
Premadasa’s most specific economic claim concerned the distribution of income between 2019 and 2025. He told Parliament that the real household income of the poorest 20% fell 19.6%, while the income of the richest 20% rose 14.8%. He also said the richest fifth’s share of income rose from 51.4% to 55.8%.
The first of those figures is exactly right, and it is traceable. An analysis of the Department of Census and Statistics’ preliminary HIES 2025 results by Dr. Pulasthi Amarasinghe of the Institute of Policy Studies — reported by this desk on 11 November — found that between 2019 and early 2025 real income among the poorest fifth fell roughly 19.6%. The match is precise enough that the Opposition Leader is evidently working from that analysis.
The second figure does not come from it. In the same analysis, the richest fifth’s gain over that same 2019–2025 window was 6.8%, not 14.8%.
14.8 does appear in the analysis — as something else entirely. It is the ratio between average incomes in the top and bottom quintiles in early 2025: the richest fifth earned 14.8 times what the poorest fifth earned, up from 10.6 times in 2016 and 11.2 in 2019. It is a multiple, not a percentage change. The richest fifth’s 2019–2025 income growth and the 2025 top-to-bottom income ratio are different quantities, and the speech appears to have substituted one for the other.
For completeness, the figures over the longer 2016–2025 window are different again: the poorest fifth lost 16.4% and the richest fifth gained 16.5%.
The 51.4%-to-55.8% income share is a third kind of measure — a share of total income rather than a growth rate — and it does not appear in the published summary of the IPS analysis. It is reproduced here as his claim; this desk has not been able to verify it against any official dataset.
None of this disturbs his underlying point. The published analysis does show the poorest fifth going sharply backwards while the richest fifth gained, and the gap between them widening by every measure available. The 14.8% figure overstates the top-end gain; it does not invent the divergence.
The dispute over poverty data
Premadasa also attacked the statistical basis of the government’s poverty figures, and here the comparison is harder to adjudicate.
He said World Bank reporting puts 2025 poverty at 61.1%. The DCS preliminary HIES 2025 headcount, reported on 7 November, is 16.0% — about 3.42 million people — measured against a survey poverty line of Rs. 16,417 per person per month. Those two numbers are not directly comparable: the World Bank publishes poverty rates against several international thresholds, and the higher upper-middle-income line captures a far larger share of the population than a national line does. The filing does not say which World Bank threshold he was citing, so the 61.1% cannot be checked against the 16% from the report alone. Readers should not treat them as rival estimates of the same thing.
His methodological criticism is more concrete. He said the official line assumes 2,030 kilocalories per person per day, against Medical Research Institute figures of 3,340 for an active man, 2,340 for an average man, 2,680 for an active woman and 1,890 for an average woman — and called the resulting figure of Rs. 17,742 per person per month false. (The DCS official poverty line is revised monthly; the Rs. 16,417 in the survey and the Rs. 17,742 he cites are not necessarily inconsistent with each other.) He said UNDP reporting also shows poverty rising sharply.
Digital economy: 5 of 17
On the digital economy — the area he tied most directly to young voters — Premadasa said Rs. 25.5 billion was allocated in 2025 and Rs. 28.5 billion in 2026, with a further Rs. 12.1 billion in operation, but that of 17 digital-sector promises made for 2026, only five have been implemented, three have shown no progress at all, and five more are delayed. The digital ID promised for the third quarter of 2026 has not appeared, nor has the contractor said to be coming. Promised broadband routers have been re-promised this year, he said, and not one of the pledged IT parks has been built.
Those three categories account for 13 of the 17; the filing does not say what became of the remaining four.
Sector by sector
- Agriculture: the promised guaranteed price of Rs. 150 per kilo of paddy has not materialised, he said, and big onion, potato, other field crops, export crops and up-country vegetable cultivation have all collapsed, with no relief in the Budget.
- Fisheries: no plan for marine or freshwater fisheries development, and the fish-finding app still does not exist — a reference to the Rs. 1 billion the Budget allocates to upgrade the fishermen’s mobile app.
- Health: severe shortages of drugs, equipment and staff, and a sector he said had been “orphaned.”
- Education: the ministry has been unable to supply computers to schools.
- Energy: renewable energy is promoted in the speech while crores go to combined-cycle plants, which he called the promotion of a “thermal power mafia.”
- MSMEs: the promised development bank still does not exist, and the 263,000 micro, small and medium entrepreneurs in difficulty as of 2022 have had no debt restructuring — only a suspension of the Parate law, which he said was done to win votes.
- Social protection: Aswesuma and Prajashakthi have failed, he said, noting that Janasaviya — the programme his own father launched — was built by people of the left.
Debt restructuring and the Lazard charge
Premadasa said the government had promised to renegotiate the debt restructuring agreement and then implemented the previous administration’s deal unchanged. He argued that the macro-linked bonds are structured so that the faster the economy grows, the smaller the debt relief becomes — reducing the country’s own incentive to grow — and alleged that the advisory firm Lazard had defrauded Sri Lanka. The filing carries no response from the government or the firm.
The broken-promise list
He ran through pledges he said are absent from the Budget: a 33% cut in electricity bills; a Rs. 1.2 million car; a Rs. 50,000 motorcycle; fuel sold at landed cost at the port; and the Rs. 1 million roofing grant promised to those hit by Cyclone Ditwah.
On the public service, he said the President now treats the country’s 1.4–1.5 million state employees as adversaries after saying nothing of the sort during the presidential campaign or the postal-vote period, and drew a parallel with farmers — “a god then, branded a moonshiner now.” Pensioners’ problems are unresolved, he said, asking why a 15% interest rate on senior citizens’ savings cannot be paid.
One concrete request: he asked that vehicle permits be given to professionals rather than MPs, arguing that with the brain drain accelerating it is professionals who need them.
He closed by saying the government had betrayed the expectations of the 6.8 million who gave it a mandate — close to the National People’s Power’s 2024 parliamentary vote — and had “killed the dreams” of the country’s 22 million people.
Not reported
The filing records no government response; the Budget debate continues for a further week, and ministers reply later in the schedule. It does not say which World Bank publication or poverty threshold the 61.1% figure comes from, nor the source of the 51.4%-to-55.8% income-share claim. Premadasa also named several foreign investment projects he said had left the country — among them China Merchants, Amber Adventures, United Petroleum and the Kerawalapitiya project — but the filing gives no dates, values or confirmation for any of them, and this desk has not verified them; a further list of apparel manufacturers in the Sinhala text is too ambiguous in transliteration to reproduce. No response from Lazard is recorded, and the filing does not state the terms of the macro-linked bonds it describes.
Sourcing
A single-source report. A keyword sweep of the Daily Mirror breaking and business rails, the NewsFirst homepage payload and the EconomyNext rail on Friday night found no other verified newsroom carrying this speech; Hiru filed it at 10.51pm Colombo time. Earlier opposition reaction to the Budget has been covered separately — Premadasa’s pre-budget criticism of the data on 12 November, and the opposition tea party — and aggregator reports of a “parrot-like speech” remark belong to his budget-day reaction on 12 November, not to this speech.
The quotations and figures are translated from a Sinhala-language filing. Readers comparing them with other outlets’ translations should expect differences in wording rather than in substance. The comparison figures in this article come from the published IPS analysis of DCS data and from the Department of Census and Statistics, not from the speech.