Hon. Bimal Rathnayake - Minister of Transport, Highways, Ports and Civil Aviation and Leader of the House of Parliament
Procurement for new vehicle number plates is at its final stage and awaiting an Appeals Board decision, following the expiry of the previous contract with Access International (Pvt) Ltd on 30 April 2025. As of 30 September 2025, 165,512 vehicles were awaiting number plates, while police, CCTV units, the State Intelligence Service and the public have been given database or app-based access to retrieve vehicle registration details. The Minister said any national security threat from non-issuance must be assessed by investigative agencies, and further details on resumption of issuance would be provided after the procurement process concludes.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Mr. Speaker, answers:
¶ 02 On whether non-issuance poses a large national security threat—this must be confirmed by the relevant investigative agencies. Recently we have seen many incidents involving vehicles linked to the elite, even with security, so causation is complex.
¶ 03 01. Procurement for number plates has been carried out and submitted for Appeals Board decision; the procurement is at its final stage.
¶ 04 02. 24/7 access has been provided for Police via the DMT Police Help Desk to query the vehicle database. Any police station can retrieve vehicle particulars at any time. The “DMT App” also allows anyone to retrieve basic vehicle information via chassis number to address current issues. The Sri Lanka Police CCTV unit has access to vehicle data. The State Intelligence Service has been facilitated, through a local mobile service provider interface, to access registration information.
¶ 05 03. As of 2025.09.30, vehicles pending issuance of number plates: 165,512.
¶ 06 04. From 2000 to 2024.04.30, based on successive procurements and Cabinet decisions, contracts were with Access International (Pvt) Ltd for number plate printing. That contract ended on 2025.04.30. A new procurement is in progress.
¶ 07 05–06. [Further details to be provided upon conclusion of procurement and issuance resumption schedule.]
¶ 08 (Proceedings continued.)
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Wednesday, 8 October 2025 ·No. 22594 ·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/18778
Cite as: Hon. Bimal Rathnayake - Minister of Transport, Highways, Ports and Civil Aviation and Leader of the House of Parliament. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 8 October 2025. No. 22594. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/18778