The Hon. (Prof.) Ruwan Ranasinghe - Deputy Minister of Tourism

¶ 01 Hon. Deputy Speaker, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the 80th Budget since Independence.

¶ 02 This is the first full-year Budget by our Government; the Appropriation Bill earlier covered nine months. Restoring a collapsed economy usually takes years or decades, as global examples show. Yet, through correct measures and fiscal discipline, we have brought macroeconomic stability within a year. Now we must sustain this stability for decades, maintaining 5–7 percent growth to achieve our development goals. That is the key focus of this Budget.

¶ 03 While other regional economies progressed—India with digitalization, high-tech agriculture, industrialization, pharmaceuticals, energy—our economy became bankrupt due to decades of mismanagement and corruption by successive administrations. Our task is to rescue the country from that chaos and take it in the right direction. The President has proposed the way forward.

¶ 04 Our six strategic objectives are: 1) Sustainable and inclusive growth—ending crony cartels and liberalizing to ensure benefits flow to ordinary people. 2) Export diversification—beyond tea, coconut, rubber, and apparel—by supporting R&D and commercialization to enter new product lines and markets. 3) Debt sustainability—reducing debt-to-GDP from 104 percent in 2022 to about 97 percent this year, with further reductions ahead. 4) Strengthening the productive economy—facilitating land and support for genuine producers and investors to build new value chains, not speculative land deals. 5) Ending rural poverty—targeted programmes to ensure growth benefits reach the poor. 6) Promoting digitalization—establishing a dedicated Ministry, aiming to raise the digital economy to USD 15 billion, and tackling corruption and inefficiency through e-processes.

¶ 05 On the public service, politicization has harmed capacity. We will recruit 75,000 on merit through proper procedures. On pensions, since 2016 certain recruits were under a contributory scheme but contributions were not collected; we therefore propose to integrate them into the standard public service pension scheme—this is fair.

¶ 06 On aviation and tourism, our main seasonal challenge is capacity. We are cancelling around 10 flights a week due to slot constraints. Terminal 2 stalled; we must now move to Terminal 3. Political interference impeded progress earlier. SriLankan Airlines is a heavy burden (over USD 200 million in debt); restructuring is underway. We will invest significantly to build a large tourism economy, including enabling domestic aviation to meet high-spend visitors’ needs.

¶ 07 To the Opposition’s claim that this Budget is not grounded in reality: we stabilized the economy within a year and now lay foundations for a production economy. We will develop the country you bankrupted. Thank you.