Pradeshiya Sabha List Sri Lanka — Local Authority Finder

This is a directory, not a calculator, so the methodology is resolution and integrity rather than arithmetic. Every step below is a pure function of the record table in lib/data/sri-lanka-local-authority-finder.ts, and the data module carries the same explanation as the page.

1. The row spine. One record per local authority, keyed by a stable id of the form districtCode-type-slug. The enumeration — which councils exist, what type each one is, and which district it sits in — comes from the Election Commission’s list for the local-authorities election of 6 May 2025, the most recent occasion on which every council in the country was named in one official place. District and province spellings are copied verbatim from our DS-division finder so the two agree letter for letter.
2. Search resolutionruns in a fixed order, and the best match wins: an exact match on the council’s English, Sinhala or Tamil name or a known alternate spelling; then an exact match on a town inside the council area; then a prefix match on the council name; then a substring match on a name or town. There is no fuzzy or edit-distance matching anywhere in the module. A wrong council sends you to the wrong counter, which is worse than no answer at all.
3. Type to statuteis the only derived field, and it is a pure function of the council’s type. Every Municipal Council in the country is constituted under the Municipal Councils Ordinance (Cap. 252), with its rating power at §230. Every Urban Council sits under the Urban Councils Ordinance (Cap. 255) and its parallel rating power. Every Pradeshiya Sabha sits under the Pradeshiya Sabhas Act No. 15 of 1987, whose Part IV is the trade-licensing power. Nothing is inferred per council.
4. Website verification. Sri Lankan councils use a fixed government domain convention: name.mc.gov.lk, name.uc.gov.lk and name.ps.gov.lk. Rather than trust the convention, every candidate address was requested over HTTPS on 2026-09-25 and classified by what came back: 97 served a real site and are linked, 42 answered with a hosting holding page or a bare directory index and are named but not linked, and 202 did not answer at all and carry no URL. A plausible domain is never constructed to fill a gap.
5. Integrity assertions.The module counts its own table two independent ways — once by council type, once by summing the 25 district totals — and requires both to equal the ministry’s published 341. It also asserts that every id is unique, that every district code is one of the official 25, that no two councils of the same type share a name inside one district, and that every recorded URL is an HTTPS address on a council’s own .gov.lk host. The badge at the top of the tool is that check running, not a claim typed underneath it.

What the tool deliberately does not do: parse a street address, geolocate you, or map ward and Grama Niladhari boundaries. That needs boundary data nobody publishes in a citable form. Town-level matching, with split towns flagged, is as far as the sources actually support.

Three different administrative layers get used interchangeably in conversation, and only one of them is elected. Getting them confused is how people end up at the wrong office.

The boundaries do not line up. A single Pradeshiya Sabha area can span parts of more than one DS division, and a DS division can contain both an Urban Council and part of a Pradeshiya Sabha. Names overlap without meaning the same ground.

• Election Commission of Sri Lanka — 2025 Local Authorities Election
• Election Commission — official results portal (per-council enumeration)
• Ministry of Public Administration, Home Affairs, Provincial Councils and Local Government
• LawNet — Municipal Councils Ordinance (Cap. 252), Urban Councils Ordinance (Cap. 255), Pradeshiya Sabhas Act No. 15 of 1987
• Department of Census and Statistics — administrative divisions of Sri Lanka
• Colombo Municipal Council — assessment tax (example of a council's own rates page)

The council list, the type split and all 341 government domains were last checked against these sources on 2026-09-25. Local authorities change only by gazette — an area elevated from Pradeshiya Sabha to Urban Council, or a council split — so the page is reviewed on a half-yearly beat and after any local-government gazette, not on a fixed calendar.