The Hon. (Dr.) Nalinda Jayatissa
Hon. (Dr.) Nalinda Jayatissa stated that Harsha Sri Bandara, an SLAS officer, was appointed in line with the historical practice of filling the Director General post of the Department of Government Information through the Administrative Service, and that a media degree is not a requirement for the post. He acknowledged longstanding neglect of the Department and related promotion issues, noting that the Government has provided allocations, begun recruitments, and will address the concerns raised to strengthen the Department’s role in media and government information dissemination.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Harsha Sri Bandara is a Sri Lanka Administrative Service (SLAS) officer. Historically, the Director General post of the Department of Government Information is filled by SLAS officers. He served as a capable Divisional Secretary in Polonnaruwa. A specific degree in media is not a requirement for this SLAS-appointed post. On promotions: it is true the Department received less attention for decades, as media functions were handled directly by line ministries. Several promotion-related issues arose, which we are now addressing. The Department should be a decisive institution for media and government information presentation; we have provided allocations and initiated several recruitments. We will focus on the issues you raised.
Provenance
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- Hansard, Friday, 9 January 2026 ·No. 23149 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
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- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
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/lk/speeches/1606
Cite as: The Hon. (Dr.) Nalinda Jayatissa. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 9 January 2026. No. 23149. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/1606