Half A Million People in the Dark Due to CEB Disconnections in 2023? Find out more… 

As Sri Lanka is trying to recover from its worst economic crisis since its independence, people are still struggling with high costs of living and utility bills. While it is true that people are facing hardships in the current circumstances, some media reports are exaggerating the country's difficult situation.

News Paper Reports

The Daily Mirror newspaper says the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) disconnected 544,488 electricity connections during the first ten months of 2023, which implies that more than half a million Sri Lankan households were forced into darkness.

Daily Mirror | Archived

The same news was carried out in Sinhala newspaper and social media posts as well, highlighting that more than half a million disconnections were made by the CEB during 2023 so far!

But were these permanent disconnections? How long did the disconnections usually last? Were they on par with disconnection percentages in recent years? We decided to look further into these questions.

Explanation by CEB

The Ceylon Electricity Board emailed us their official available data regarding our queries. In their official response, CEB states that a significant number of the customers paid their arrears within a very short period from the disconnection and obtained the electricity supply.

The CEB spokesman, Engineer Noel Priyantha, confirms the total cumulative disconnections for the first 10 months of 2023 (January to October) did actually tally with the figure given in the newspaper report of 544,488. Yet he states that the newspaper report does not show the complete picture since it fails to mention that most disconnected connections were reconnected as soon as the customers made the due payments.

Furthermore, The CEB spokesman stated that the percentage of disconnections in 2023 is in line with the usual percentage of disconnections in any given year in the recent past. He also said that most of these connections have been reconnected as the customers made the due payments within the shortest possible time.

According to the official data of the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL), there are around the country. In 2023, the average number of disconnected connections per month is about 54,000, considering the first ten months' data. This represents approximately 0.8% of all electricity-consuming units in the country. This percentage is in line with the usual rate of disconnections, says a media spokesman.

The CEB spokesman also shared the Annual Disconnection numbers of CEB pertaining to the last four years, as seen below.

As per this data from CEB, it’s evident that the number of annual disconnections in 2021 and 2022 mentioned in newspaper reports is accurate. However, additional context should be added here.

According to the above breakdown, similar to the current year, in 2019, the average monthly number of disconnections was close to 50K, with a total of 573,073 annual temporary disconnections.

But it was drastically reduced to 210,380 in 2020, and in 2021, it was at its lowest with a mere 94,201 disconnections. The reason for this trend is in line with the more extended grace periods granted due to humanitarian reasons owing to the COVID-19 pandemic period. During this time, CEB avoided disconnections as much as possible. News reports about how CEB gave extended grace periods and avoided disconnections can be found here, here, here, and here.

However, in 2023, the disconnection rate is again similar to the pre-COVID period.

Current Grace Period for Disconnections

“CEB disconnects customers who have not paid their bills after 30 days, with an additional ten days' notice. The specific disconnection criteria may vary depending on the area and the number of customers there, " CEB spokesman Noel Priyantha said.

Follow us and stay up to date with our latest fact checks.

Facebook | Twitter |Instagram | Google News | TikTok