10th Parliament· 154 sittings on record · 30,475 speeches · latest 10 June 2026

The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake

Jathika Jana balawegaya· National List· 20 June 2025 ·Oral question: Oral Question: Southern Expressway Interchanges (Q.Unspecified/2024)

Public FinanceInfrastructureCorruption & Governance Reform
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Hon. Bimal Rathnayake stated that two Southern Expressway interchanges, at Kapuduwa and Baddegama, were added outside the original design due to political influence, at significant cost. He noted that an interchange can cost over Rs. 1 billion, or at least around Rs. 600 million, and said the current obstacle cited is court action affecting land acquisition. He also observed that the proposed industrial zone connected to the matter had not yet been built.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Hon. Speaker, to add to the Hon. Member’s point, two interchanges/entrances not in the original Southern Expressway design were built due to political influence: Kapuduwa (about 5 km from Matara–Godagama) and Baddegama (about 6 km from Beliatta). An interchange generally costs over Rs. 1 billion; even a basic one around Rs. 600 million. In this case, the cited obstacle is court action preventing land acquisition. As far as I know, the proposed industrial zone is not yet built. Therefore—

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Friday, 20 June 2025 ·No. 1751600792021434 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
Page · column
not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
Permalink
/lk/speeches/1870

Cite as: The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 20 June 2025. No. 1751600792021434. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/1870