• More than half of Colombo’s population lives on just 9% of the city’s land
• Survey finds 98% of settlements have been upgraded on-site, fewer than 1% rank as unsustainable
• Govt. plans thousands of new apartments despite acknowledging serious failures in earlier housing schemes
• Narrow access roads, unsafe wiring, dense construction leave many communities highly vulnerable to fires
• Residents face relocation as railway expansion and urban redevelopment gather pace

“If a fire breaks out in one house, and we are delayed in reaching it, the entire area catches fire progressively,” says Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) Acting Chief Fire Officer P.D.K.A. Wilson, recounting the six or seven major blazes his teams have battled in the city’s informal settlements in recent years.

Even when the ground looks passable, he said, overhead wiring and makeshift extensions block his engines from reaching the source of the fire. 

When help arrives late, residents turn their anger on the firefighters themselves. “They shout at us, saying we were late. No matter how much we tell them, they do not accept the reality of these structural barriers,” he told The Sunday Morning.

It is a scene that has repeated itself for decades in the congested, self-built neighbourhoods that ring Colombo’s canals, railway lines, and reclaimed marshland – communities long labelled, in policy documents and popular imagination alike, as slums and shanties.

But as the Government moves ahead with an ambitious programme to clear these settlements and relocate their residents into high-rise apartment blocks, new data is complicating the picture of who exactly lives in these neighbourhoods and what kind of housing they actually occupy.

A city built around its poor

Over half of Colombo’s population lives in what have historically been classified as underserved settlements, occupying just 9% of the city’s total land area, according to a 2010 Urban Development Authority (UDA) survey that identified 68,812 families living across 1,499 community clusters without adequate access to clean water, electricity, or sanitation. 

That survey became the foundation for the Urban Regeneration Programme (URP), the UDA’s flagship policy since 2010, which set out to relocate over 68,000 families from low-income neighbourhoods into high-rise public housing – freeing up commercially valuable land in the process.

But a more recent, and far more granular, body of research suggests that the slum label may no longer reflect reality for large parts of the city. The Colombo Settlements Survey (CSS) 2023 – a joint undertaking by the Sevanatha Urban Resource Centre and Colombo Urban Lab, conducted in close collaboration with the CMC and funded by the Open Society Foundations – surveyed 1,360 settlements across all six municipal districts of the city.

It mapped roughly 379,909 residents living in 55,866 houses across 87,119 families, scoring each settlement on 27 indicators ranging from land tenure and housing quality to open space and social capital. The findings, the third in a longitudinal series dating back to 2002, prompted researchers to formally drop the ‘underserved’ label in favour of ‘settlements’.

Structurally, these communities bear little resemblance to the sprawling, unserviced slums of the wider Global South. Most are small and fragmented rather than sprawling: 54.6% of settlements have fewer than 20 houses, with settlements of 10–20 houses alone accounting for 32.5% (442 settlements) of the city total, while those with more than 200 houses make up a mere 2.8% (38 settlements). 

The vast majority – 98.16% – are on-site upgraded settlements rather than makeshift shanties, a legacy of the Million Houses Programme launched in 1984, under which the National Housing Development Authority regularised land and encouraged residents to incrementally build and upgrade their own homes. Today, 93.9% of settlements have permanent construction in at least 80% of their housing units, and 64.5% are expanding vertically rather than outward, adding second storeys as families grow. 

In 70.37% of settlements, at least 80% of families have lived in the same location for more than 30 years, and 83.2% of settlements have most households paying municipal property rates – a status that, residents say, has become a de facto proof of occupancy in disputes over their right to remain.

Access to basic services tells a similar story. Individually metered water connections now reach 97.9% of settlements, up from 75% in 2012, following the National Water Supply and Drainage Board’s systematic phasing out of shared public standposts. 

Electricity access has reached 98.8%, including 62.87% of settlements (855) with sufficient streetlighting and a further 35.81% (487) with metered connections but insufficient lighting – residents commonly complain that what lighting exists is confined to settlement entrances and frequently broken. 

Over 80% of settlements now have individual toilets in most houses, a sharp rise from 47.6% in 2012, and more than three-quarters are connected to the main sewer network. 

Waste collection, however, has been restructured rather than simply improved: door-to-door collection fell from 51.07% of settlements in 2012 to just 11.3% in 2023, while collection from communal points surged from 35.87% to 78.2%, as the CMC shifted to contracting waste services out to private operators and as poor access roads made door-to-door collection increasingly impractical.

Where the gaps remain

Not all indicators point upward. Shared infrastructure within settlements has deteriorated even as individual household services improved. 

Only 20.1% of settlements have properly tarred inner roads with maintained drains – actually down from 27% in 2012 – leaving the rest reliant on narrow gravel paths or footpaths prone to flooding, clogging, and mosquito breeding. Open, green, or recreational space is almost entirely absent, with 63.1% of settlements having none at all.

The steepest decline, researchers found, is in social capital. Some 80.1% of settlements (1,090) now have no functioning Community-Based Organisation (CBO) at all, and only 5.1% (70 settlements) have a CBO that is very actively engaged in service delivery and community welfare work. A further 69% of settlements (938) have no community centre within their boundaries or even in a nearby settlement, leaving residents without a formal space for gatherings or information-sharing.

Meanwhile, 83.8% lack any community-run savings or credit scheme – a gap researchers flagged as especially dangerous in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022 economic crisis, leaving households more exposed to predatory moneylenders and unregulated microfinance. 

The CBOs and Community Development Councils that once mobilised residents to fight for water and electricity connections, the survey notes, largely disbanded once those services were secured – leaving communities with fewer collective tools to resist eviction or negotiate compensation today.

Taken together, the CSS 2023’s sustainability scorecard found that 32.06% of settlements are highly sustainable and 66.99% moderately sustainable, with fewer than 1% falling into low or poor categories. 

Researchers argue this undercuts the rationale for blanket relocation and have set out four specific policy recommendations: excluding fully upgraded, highly sustainable settlements from relocation lists altogether; providing residents with freehold land deeds to encourage further self-investment; revitalising the CMC’s Community Development Council network to rebuild local CBOs and social safety nets; and supporting community-driven upgrades to inner access roads and drainage, alongside community-based savings and credit schemes to protect families from predatory lenders.

Government’s case for relocation

The State’s position is that relocation remains necessary, but that its methods are changing. 

Under the URP, relocated families are typically allocated 550 sq ft units – comprising a living room, pantry, two bedrooms, a washroom, and a balcony – at an estimated average cost of Rs. 6.5 million per unit, with basic infrastructure including three-phase electricity, sewerage, and drainage linked to the centralised city system. Since 2013, 27 such high-rise housing projects have been completed.

It is a record Deputy Minister of Urban Development Eranga Gunasekara, speaking to The Sunday Morning, was blunt about. “We have 27 of our own flat complexes and I have visited several of them. To be honest, they are like hell. They are not fit for living in. They make people turn into devils rather than allowing them to live as human beings.”

According to Gunasekara, under the newer model, the ministry is working to physically rehabilitate these older complexes while redesigning future ones – including the Colombage Mawatha scheme, which integrates access to hospitals, schools, and community facilities directly into its design. 

“When handing over a house, it should not merely be a building, but a fully habitable settlement,” he said, adding that officials had examined whether safety, social needs, comfort, and convenience could be improved before occupancy. 

He said two apartment complexes were expected to be completed this year, followed by another 11 in the coming years. Separately, he noted that three housing schemes in total were scheduled to be handed over this year. 

Alongside this, 2,500 urban housing units are earmarked for low-income and permanently homeless families by 2026 under the Colombo Urban Revitalisation Partnership Programme, with 7,000 additional units planned for Colombo over the next two years.

Gunasekara also pushed back on the idea that relocation is forced. “We do not resettle people by force,” he said, describing a roughly two-year construction window used for “social socialisation” programmes – preparing families for apartment living, from waste disposal to managing shared spaces. 

To prevent re-encroachment once an area is cleared, the ministry is moving towards clearing entire designated zones at once rather than isolated patches, immediately earmarking cleared land for other use and developing a digital tracking system to log which families have already received housing. “Once a person receives a house, they will be checked by the system so they cannot go somewhere else and get new houses,” he said.

The approach is set to expand nationally under the Life Cities (Jeewana Nagara) programme, targeting 10 cities this year and 16 more next year. 

Separately, the Ministry of Transport and Highways has its own clearance agenda, tied to double- and triple-tracking works along the Coastal Line and Main Line under the Colombo Suburban Railway Project, and to electrification plans along the Kelani Valley Line. 

Also within scope is the planned expansion of the Ragama-Negombo-Katunayake Airport branch line, which similarly requires clear reservation boundaries. Informal settlements sitting within the mandatory 10-to-15-metre safety buffer of railway land in areas such as Maradana, Dematagoda, Wanathamulla, and Kompanna Vidiya fall within scope. 

Under the Railways Ordinance No. 9 of 1902, occupying reservation land without written permission is a punishable encroachment. In practice, the ministry’s policy framework states that arrangements will be made “to improve the living standard of families living in railway reservations through resettlement into permanent housing units or payment of compensation,” with the Department of Railways serving statutory notices while the UDA allocates apartment units to eligible displaced households. 

Property owners holding legal deeds within acquisition boundaries receive monetary compensation based on valuation; informal settlers instead receive long-lease titles to UDA-built units.

A fire service learning to adapt

Back in the settlements themselves, Wilson’s fire crews are trying to work within the reality on the ground rather than wait for it to change. 

“The issue is that these informal settlements are not built with any standards or approvals; people just construct them as they please,” he said. Compliant construction, he explained, would require priority access roads, non-combustible materials, and clearances between houses – conditions rarely met in Colombo’s densest clusters.

Even Government-built relocation housing has not solved the problem entirely. “We ensure that these new housing complexes comply with our fire safety requirements. However, over time, the residents alter them back into the same unsafe state,” Wilson said, adding that built-in fire safety systems in some housing schemes had been dismantled and sold, often by residents struggling with drug addiction. “We then have to spend millions to renovate, upgrade, and secure them once again.”

In response, the CMC Fire Service has shifted towardS training volunteer response teams within settlements and relocation complexes alike, with officers now visiting communities regularly to identify young people with leadership potential. “We want to select positive individuals and school leavers with leadership potential to form teams, as this is how we plan to manage these safety systems in a positive and sustainable way,” Wilson said.