Sri Lankan sports minister Sunil Kumara Gamage at the stadium site on Mandaitivu on 8 November. Photograph: Daily Mirror
Construction of the Jaffna international cricket stadium on Mandaitivu island is set to resume next week, Sri Lanka Cricket has said, eight months after Sri Lanka's environmental authority halted work because the project lacked an environmental impact assessment.
Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) said all necessary approvals, clearances and certificates had been obtained, and that the contract for the remaining construction work had been awarded.
Sri Lanka's sports minister, Sunil Kumara Gamage, inspected the site on Sunday with Jaffna MP K Ilankumaran. He told reporters that construction had been delayed by difficulties in obtaining several required environmental reports, but that all the necessary documents had now been obtained and preliminary work completed. He said the stadium was expected to be finished within a year.
According to SLC, the inspection found claims that the site was prone to flooding during the rainy season to be baseless. Neither SLC nor the minister said whether the Central Environmental Authority (CEA) had approved an environmental impact assessment for the project, or what conditions had been attached to any clearance.
The Sri Lankan president Anura Kumara Dissanayake laid the foundation stone in September 2025 for a 40,000-seat stadium on 48 acres, intended to anchor a 138-acre sports city with hotels, apartments and a shopping complex. In February, the CEA ordered work to stop after it emerged that environmental clearance had not been secured.
The Sri Lankan president Anura Kumara Dissanayake at the foundation stone ceremony on Mandaitivu in September 2025. File photograph
CEA director general Kapila Mahesh Rajapaksha told The Morning at the time that the project could not proceed until SLC submitted a completed assessment of its ecological impact. “Until then, all ground-level activities will remain suspended,” he said.
Environmental groups had accused SLC of filling and fencing around 138 acres of wetland without approval. The Wildlife and Nature Protection Society said Mandaitivu functioned as a natural flood-retention zone that was inundated in 2012, 2017 and 2025, and warned that the destruction of mangroves and seagrass beds threatened lagoon fisheries on which local families depend.
In June, SLC scaled back the project to a cricket ground, saying it lacked the funds for the stadium, sports city and housing originally announced. The Velanai Pradeshiya Sabha had earlier refused to hand over council land for hotels and other facilities linked to the project.
Residents have also raised concerns over the island's past. Families of those disappeared during a Sri Lankan military operation in August 1990, when at least 80 young men from Mandaitivu, Allaipiddy and Mankumban were taken, have petitioned a magistrate's court to excavate wells where they believe the bodies were dumped. The case remains before the courts after repeated adjournments.
Families commemorate the disappeared at a sealed well in Mandaitivu in August. File photograph
Jaffna lawyer Benislos Thushan told The Morning that Mandaitivu had been a heavily militarised area where Father Jim Brown disappeared in 2006.
“People are asking, ‘If you really bury this, is it a way of burying the truth?’” he said.
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