The Ministry of Rural Development, Social Security and Community Empowerment will introduce new regulations to make registration mandatory for all elders’ care homes in Sri Lanka, in direct response to the Anguruwatota fire that killed 12 residents this week, NewsFirst reported.

Minister Dr. Upali Pannilage said a comprehensive set of guidelines for the sector had already been prepared and would be forwarded to the country’s Provincial Councils for approval. Under the proposed framework, registration would become mandatory for all elders’ homes — closing a long-standing gap that has allowed unlicensed facilities to operate beyond the reach of official inspectors.

The minister said 455 elders’ homes have been officially registered to date, providing care for more than 10,000 elderly residents. However, “a number of institutions continue to operate without proper registration”, he said, including the Anguruwatota facility at the centre of Tuesday’s fire.

Authorities have confirmed the Anguruwatota care home was unlicensed at the time of the blaze, which killed 12 residents and left eight others injured. Kalutara District Secretary Sunanda Herath has separately said it had been operating without a valid licence, while villagers told reporters a petition with more than 100 signatures had previously been submitted to local authorities calling for intervention — but no action had been taken before the fire. The director of the home, identified as Isuru Anushka Perera, was remanded until June 11 by the Horana Magistrate’s Court on Thursday.

The minister said the government had taken steps to assist surviving residents of the Anguruwatota home, with the Director of the National Secretariat for Elders visiting the site to initiate support measures. The Secretariat had separately confirmed earlier this week that the facility, identified by its operating name “Mawpiya Sewana Senehase Kedella”, had been running since 2024 without the registration required under Sri Lanka’s elder-care laws and had housed 62 persons with mental health conditions alongside eight elderly residents at the time of the fire.

Investigations into the cause of the fire are continuing, with preliminary findings pointing to a possible electrical fault near a water pump as the ignition source.

Update — June 7: Minister Pannilage clarified that only 148 of the 455 elderly care homes reported across the country are currently registered with the National Secretariat for Elders, and said action will now be taken against facilities operating illegally without registration. The final proposal for regulations has been drafted and discussions with Provincial Councils are underway; the rules will be implemented once consensus is reached. Eight surviving residents aged over 60 from the Anguruwatota home have been relocated to a government-run elderly care facility in Kataragama, the minister added, with post-mortem examinations of those who died still in progress.

Update — June 11: The draft regulations for elders’ homes are expected to be submitted to Parliament and gazetted in the near future, the Director of the National Secretariat for Elders, K. Chathura Mihidum, told NewsFirst. The Secretariat will also conduct an islandwide survey of elders’ homes from June 15, citing continuing reports of unregistered facilities operating across the country. Mihidum said the survey will additionally focus on identifying persons under 50 with disabilities currently residing in elders’ homes and on exploring mechanisms to relocate them to suitable alternative facilities — the first formal acknowledgment that some homes are housing younger residents with disabilities outside their intended scope.

Sources