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

The Hon. Ajith Gihan

Jathika Jana balawegaya· Puttalam· 25 February 2025 ·Debate: Second Reading Debate: Appropriation Bill 2025 (Continuation Day 7)

Cost of LivingPublic Finance
AI summary generated by gpt-5.5

Ajith Gihan supported the Government’s ceremonial Budget, arguing that it is grounded in the NPP policy framework “A Prosperous Country – A Beautiful Life” and aimed at rebuilding a weakened economy. He said the Budget’s foundation is poverty reduction through strengthening production and services, while noting that Sri Lanka must improve its export performance to match faster-growing Asian economies.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Hon. Deputy Speaker, as we debate this ceremonial Budget of the Tenth Parliament, it is clear how responsible this Government is. In 76 years of parliamentary history, we now see a Budget grounded in plans for our future and for economic progress. In the past, after Budgets were presented, people fell from where they stood—poverty deepened—despite being given dreams.

¶ 02 A Budget must be based on where we are, what our foundation is, and where we must go. There is no magic here. We inherited a devastated economy, a country isolated in the world. This Budget is built on an economic foundation aligned with our NPP policy “A Prosperous Country – A Beautiful Life.”

¶ 03 Its base is ending poverty—by rebuilding the economy on production and services. Many Asian countries have surpassed us with robust growth. Yet Sri Lanka’s export sector last year...

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Tuesday, 25 February 2025 ·No. 1741258607035810 ·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/26636

Cite as: The Hon. Ajith Gihan. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 25 February 2025. No. 1741258607035810. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/26636