The Public Health Inspectors’ Union of Sri Lanka says the 2027 Budget proposals do nothing for the roughly 2,400 inspectors who carry out the country’s frontline public health work, and has called for the omissions to be corrected within the Budget itself.
The union’s objection, reported by the Daily Mirror, turns on a comparison. Office allowances for other field officers were increased in this year’s Budget — but those officers cover a single Grama Niladhari division. Public Health Inspectors are responsible for areas spanning 10 to 20 Grama Niladhari divisions and are required to maintain field offices across them.
Their office allowances were left untouched at Rs. 1,500 a month in urban areas and Rs. 750 in rural areas.
Travel and motorcycles
The union also said travel allowances went unrevised, noting that inspectors cover around 100 kilometres a day moving between the areas they are responsible for. It further said the Budget contained no programme to issue motorcycles to officers who are eligible for them but have not yet received one.
Inspectors serve under both the Department of Health and provincial administrations, and the union said they continue to work islandwide despite the operational difficulties. The statement was issued by C.S. Muthukuda, General Secretary of the Public Health Inspectors’ Union of Sri Lanka.
A pattern across the public service
The complaint is the latest in a run of post-Budget grievances from state-sector professions. Public service engineers struck over a field allowance cut in 2024 that the Budget did not restore, and irrigation technical assistants and disaster-relief officers have begun staged strike action over allowances. Unlike those groups, the inspectors’ union has not announced any trade union action.
Sourcing note
The Daily Mirror’s filing, under the byline of Chaturanga Pradeep Samarawickrama, was the only account of this statement this desk could retrieve. Ada Derana has also covered it, but its site has returned a block page to every request from this desk for roughly two weeks, so its report could not be fetched or date-verified and is not cited here. No filing carries a response from the Ministry of Health or the Treasury, and none says what the increase granted to single-division field officers amounts to — the figure the union is measuring itself against.