Friday Aug 07, 2026
Friday Aug 07, 2026
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FTZMA Chairman Dhammika Fernando (left) presenting the proposal to BOI Director General Dr. Sulakshana Jayawardena as Chairman Duminda Hulangamuwa looks on
The Window would replace luck with a process for which someone is responsible. It would not matter who the proposer is, who they know, or what letterhead they write on. It would matter whether the idea can strengthen the economy, whether someone credible is ready to implement it, and whether the obstacle in its way is one the Government can remove
The FTZMA proposes a national window where anyone, a professional, a factory, a university, a Sri Lankan abroad, can propose an idea that helps the country earn from the world. The earnings are what keep fuel in the pumps, gas in the kitchen and medicine on the shelves for everyone, and what will repay the country's debts.
By the FTZMA
The Free Trade Zone Manufacturers' Association of Sri Lanka (FTZMA) officially handed over to the Chairman of the Board of Investment, Duminda Hulangamuwa, and the Director General, Dr. Sulakshana Jayawardena, a detailed proposal to establish a National Facilitation and Activation Window, a standing channel through which anyone can bring forward an idea capable of strengthening Sri Lanka's economy, above all ideas that create new foreign exchange inflows for the country.
The proposal, prepared and unanimously endorsed by the association's Executive Committee with the backing of its membership, sets out how the Window could be opened quickly, run by a small team of existing officers, and operated at almost no cost to the Treasury. The investment in every activated case would be private. What the State provides is the one thing only the State can provide, a cleared path.
A country's future is decided not only in budgets and boardrooms, but in the ideas its people are allowed to bring forward. That conviction runs through every page of the document now on the BOI's table.
A door for the whole country
Although the proposal has been placed with the BOI, the Window it describes is designed as a truly national door. Any Sri Lankan or foreign investor, business, professional, university, industry body or member of the diaspora could walk through it with an idea that can earn or save foreign exchange, or otherwise make the economy stronger and more resilient.
Ideas that fall within the BOI's own authority would move directly under its facilitation. Ideas that belong to another institution would not be turned away. The Window would refer them to the authority legally responsible, and the BOI would remain the coordinator, following each case until the person who brought the idea receives a clear answer. No idea would die simply because its owner knocked on the wrong door. Under this design, there is no wrong door.
The Window is equally open to businesses already operating in Sri Lanka. An investor who is earning foreign exchange today, but is held back by an unclear rule, a stalled approval, a locked facility or a procedure no office will confirm in writing, could bring that exact block forward, together with the way out they can already see, and ask for the specific facilitation that would release more earnings. The association sees every small discouraging rule as a national cost, because every blocked path quietly redirects investment to another country, and every cleared path invites it back.
Proposal window, not complaints box
The proposed Window is not a place to lodge grievances and wait for the State to find answers. Sri Lanka has enough channels for describing problems. This one exists for something rarer, describing solutions.
The reasoning is simple. The person who lives with a problem is usually also the person who knows the practical way out of it, and that knowledge is exactly what the Window asks to receive. Every submission must therefore arrive as a complete proposal: the activity that will earn or save foreign exchange, the person or organisation ready to implement it, the private resources standing behind it, and the exact facilitation requested from Government. A submission that only describes what is wrong, without proposing what can be made to work and who will make it work, would be courteously directed to the appropriate channel and would not enter the Window at all.
The Window's question to the country is not what is troubling you. It is what can you make work, and what one decision do you need to begin.
"The Government does not have to build the activity. It has to open the path, and private energy does the rest," said FTZMA Chairman Dhammika Fernando at the handover.
Answer in days, not years
The heart of the proposal is speed with accountability. Every complete submission would receive a named BOI case officer and a clear preliminary decision within the least possible number of working days, and in every case within a month. The month is the outer limit, not the pace. A straightforward case could receive its answer within days, even within a single day.
Proposals that can proceed under existing law would be fast tracked. Proposals that need careful testing could run as limited, supervised pilots under powers regulators already hold. Barriers that need decisions at a higher level would be carried upward through defined channels rather than left to drift. And every applicant would receive a definite answer, because the proposal's position is that a fast no is more valuable to a serious business person than an endless maybe.
Success would be counted in one currency only, foreign exchange actually received and confirmed through the banking system. Not proposals collected, not meetings held, not investments announced. Verified earnings,
or nothing.
The next billion dollars Sri Lanka earns may begin as a form filled in on a phone. This proposal was designed for that. Sri Lanka's development would then no longer rest on a handful of institutions or individuals doing their best under pressure. It would be powered by countless minds, inside the country and across the world, all pulling in one direction
Where every reader comes in
If the Window opens, the door it opens belongs to everyone.
The engineer in Jaffna who knows how to export a testing service. The doctor whose foreign patients ask why they cannot be treated here. The young graduate running a design service for overseas clients from a bedroom in Matara. The retired Customs officer who knows exactly which procedure blocks a re-export opportunity, and exactly how to fix it safely. The Sri Lankan in Melbourne or Milan who sees demand for something this island can supply. The university researcher whose work could become a certification service the whole region would pay for.
Today, a person with such an idea must know someone, or be lucky, or be extraordinarily persistent. An idea travels only as far as its owner's personal contacts, and the country cannot count how many valuable opportunities have quietly died this way, because what is never properly received is never recorded.
The Window would replace luck with a process for which someone is responsible. It would not matter who the proposer is, who they know, or what letterhead they write on. It would matter whether the idea can strengthen the economy, whether someone credible is ready to implement it, and whether the obstacle in its way is one the Government can remove. Notice what all the people described above have in common. None of them is bringing a complaint. Each is bringing an answer, worked out from their own knowledge, needing only one cleared path to become real. If those things are true, the proposer gets a fair hearing, a named officer, and a clear answer, fast.
The next billion dollars Sri Lanka earns may begin as a form filled in on a phone. This proposal was designed for that.
Sri Lanka's development would then no longer rest on a handful of institutions or individuals doing their best under pressure. It would be powered by countless minds, inside the country and across the world, all pulling in one direction.
Proven abroad, adapted for Sri Lanka
The idea is not an experiment invented on a desk in Colombo. Singapore has operated a national channel of this family for over two decades, receiving more than two thousand suggestions from its business community and converting them into over one thousand one hundred effective changes to rules and regulations. The United Kingdom gives innovators a dedicated case manager and a supervised way to test new business models before the rulebook catches up. The FTZMA proposal combines these proven components around a single Sri Lankan purpose, earning the foreign exchange the country needs.
Every reader in Colombo has, in fact, already seen this principle at work. For decades the marshy lands around the city were places people avoided. Then the State did one simple thing, it made them accessible. Walking tracks were laid, lighting was added, safe entry was provided. Diyatha Uyana, Weras Ganga Park, Beddagana, Diyasaru and the walkways around the lakes are the result, full from early morning, and in 2018 Colombo became the first capital city accredited as an International Wetland City under the Ramsar Convention. Nobody instructed the public to walk. The desire was always there, blocked only by mud. The State removed the mud, paved the way, and the people did the rest. Foreign exchange behaves exactly the same way.
Why the Association acted now
Sri Lanka's debt restructuring has bought valuable breathing space, and heavier repayments lie ahead as grace periods end in the years after 2028. Every new earning pathway needs time to obtain approvals, win customers, invest, recruit and mature before it yields. The pathways that must be earning by 2028 have to be opened now. A country that borrowed its way into difficulty cannot borrow its way out. It can only earn its way out, and earning takes lead time.
The FTZMA represents export manufacturers who have operated in Sri Lanka's free trade zones for decades, earning foreign exchange every working day and employing hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans directly and through their supply chains. These are enterprises that have kept their capital, their factories and their faith in this country through its hardest years. When an association of such investors studies a mechanism, endorses it unanimously and places it before the State, it speaks for people who have backed Sri Lanka with their own money and intend to keep doing so.
"This proposal did not come from frustration. It came from confidence," Fernando said. "Our members have watched the country stabilise after its most painful crisis. We believe this recovery has created a short and precious window in which Sri Lanka can build the earning capacity it has lacked for nearly half a century, and we decided the most useful thing we could do was to put a complete, workable mechanism on the table of the institution best placed to run it."
Received the way it deserved
The association has placed on record that the proposal was received the way a serious proposal deserves to be received. The BOI Chairman and Director General gave the FTZMA delegation their time, their attention and their questions, and the current BOI leadership has already shown, through recent decisions facilitating re-export trade, a willingness to unlock long closed doors when the national case is made.
The FTZMA has also addressed the officers of the BOI directly. If the Window opens, they are the ones who will make it real. A case officer who moves a blocked proposal to activation will have done something few public servants ever get to do, put a new stream of foreign exchange into the country's account, visibly and measurably, with the results counted, published and credited. There are few forms of public service where the connection between an officer's work and the nation's benefit is that direct.
The decision now sits with the Board of Investment, and the Association has expressed its respect and confidence in the leadership now considering it. What could follow is something larger than one proposal changing hands, a Sri Lanka where no good idea dies for want of a door to knock on
Commitment, not ceremony
The FTZMA has made clear that it did not hand over this proposal to watch from the gallery. The association has committed to supporting the BOI through implementation. Its member companies will bring forward credible founding cases so that the Window opens with a working pipeline rather than an empty portal, and its engineers, professionals, exporters and managers will share their practical knowledge of where the blocks are. The association has also stated that it will accept the same rules as everyone else, no privileged approvals, every case through the same gateways.
It invites the chambers, the professional bodies, the universities and the diaspora organisations to make the same commitment, because a mechanism like this succeeds when the whole productive community treats it as its own.
The decision now sits with the Board of Investment, and the association has expressed its respect and confidence in the leadership now considering it. What could follow is something larger than one proposal changing hands, a Sri Lanka where no good idea dies for want of a door to knock on.
Every reader can start preparing now, and preparing means more than just naming a problem. What can you offer the world, who will do the work, and what one decision would let you begin? The country is getting ready to ask those questions, and for the first time, there may soon be a place to receive and process them.
(Issued by the Free Trade Zone Manufacturers' Association of Sri Lanka, which represents export manufacturers operating in the country under the purview of Board of Investment. The Association can be reached at
[email protected])
