Legislation creating a Central Highlands Protection Authority will go before Parliament by the end of this year or early next year, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake said on Friday, and future plantation lease agreements will carry written protections for estate communities.

The President was speaking at Poonagala in Badulla, where he handed over 50 houses to families displaced by the 2023 Kabaragala Mountain landslide.

The authority

The bill is being drafted with support from the Asian Development Bank, the Daily Mirror reported. The body would hold full powers over protection and conservation of the highlands, consolidating responsibilities now spread across departments covering biodiversity, soil conservation, forests, wildlife, irrigation and agriculture, according to NewsFirst.

Dissanayake said 103 rivers and streams rise in the Central Highlands, making the region central to agriculture, water supply and the wider economy. “The Central Highlands represent the very heart of Sri Lanka,” he said.

He linked decades of unplanned development to a sharp rise in slope failures, saying landslides were once relatively rare but that Sri Lanka now records thousands of incidents, including more than 1,200 major landslides during recent adverse weather. He described the damage in terms of what he had seen himself — landslides, natural springs drying up, and rivers and streams silting over, Ada Derana reported. “We are witnessing its destruction before our very eyes,” he said. Restoring the region could take decades, he added, but the practices causing the damage have to stop now.

The President acknowledged the cost of that. Some people could lose houses or plantation land to protection measures, he said, but the work should proceed with the highlands treated as a national responsibility.

The proposal has been in preparation for months. Officials briefed the President on the legal provisions in April, when the ADB and the International Union for Conservation of Nature were among those represented.

The 2042 leases

Dissanayake said land ownership remains the most pressing concern for plantation communities, whose members have contributed for generations without securing rights to the land they live on. The lease agreements governing plantation companies expire by 2042, the relevant ministry has appointed a committee to review them, and the government intends to settle the question well before expiry.

“When new agreements are negotiated, a key priority will be the inclusion of provisions that safeguard and protect the rights of these communities,” he said, adding: “I assure you that we are committed to ensuring that you enjoy full rights and a dignified life in this country as our own brothers and sisters.”

A second Daily Mirror report on the same ceremony quoted him more directly: “The Malayagam community, who have contributed to building our country’s economy for more than 200 years, are our own people. Where they came from and when they came here are not important. That is history.” Many still hold neither land nor a house of their own, he said. The newsrooms name the community differently — Ada Derana uses Malaiyaha Tamil, the Daily Mirror Malayagam, NewsFirst “estate communities”.

Title deeds already changing hands

What else happened at the ceremony partly answers the question of form. The President also presented freehold title deeds to 163 people living in houses built under the India-funded Indian Housing Programme, which is constructing 4,000 units, in the Haldummulla, Bandarawela and Haputale Divisional Secretariat Divisions of Badulla District.

That is title over house plots, not plantation land, and it comes from a separate scheme rather than the lease renegotiation. But it shows freehold transfer to estate families is administratively possible — the mechanism at issue in the 2042 talks. Dissanayake added that housing has been given priority in the forthcoming Budget, and that the previous Cabinet moved to clear the obstacles facing people who left for India during the war and want to return.

None of the reports set out what form the plantation-lease protections would take, or whether they would extend beyond house plots to the land estate families work.

Sources