By Ruwan Weerakoon
(Lanka-e-News -2026.July.07, 10.00 PM) The Sri Lankan government has approved compensation of Rs. 1 million each for four additional patients who lost their eyesight or suffered permanent vision impairment after receiving contaminated Prednisolone Acetate eye drops during cataract surgeries at state hospitals — a scandal that unfolded under the tenure of former Health Minister Keheliya Rambukwella and has since spiralled into a wave of civil litigation seeking hundreds of millions of rupees in damages.
The compensation decision builds on payments already made to 17 patients who developed serious eye complications following cataract surgeries performed at the Nuwara Eliya District General Hospital between March 3 and May 16, 2023. Those patients were administered the same batch of Prednisolone Acetate — manufactured by Indiana Ophthalmics LLP of India and supplied locally through Chamee Chemist Ltd. of Yakkala — as post-operative eye drops.
Following those cases, the Health Ministry appointed a special expert medical committee to review complications reported from other hospitals where the same eye drop had been administered. On the committee's recommendation, the four additional patients — assessed as having suffered outright loss of eyesight rather than partial impairment — were approved for compensation, with the final decision taken after the Minister of Health presented supporting facts to Cabinet.
The eye drop batch had in fact been traced to a Gujarat-based manufacturer and its Mumbai-based supplier, Alvita Pharma. NMRA chairman Professor S.D. Jayaratne said the regulator first raised an alarm in May 2023 and wrote to the manufacturer, the supplier, and Indian drug regulators, but received no response . Laboratory testing found the drops were substandard due to non-conformity with sterility tests, and patients who used them went on to develop endophthalmitis — a severe intraocular infection. The NMRA subsequently informed the World Health Organization about the bacterial contamination findings and asked Alvita Pharma to recall the product, while Sri Lanka halted further purchases of the Gujarat-made drops.
For the Nuwara Eliya patients, the clinical course was rapid: symptoms of tearing, discomfort, pain, and headaches emerged within roughly two weeks of surgery, and by the time of admission to the National Eye Hospital in Colombo, doctors confirmed the patients were losing sight in the operated eye, a number progressing to complete blindness.
The eye drop scandal did not occur in isolation. It surfaced alongside other substandard-drug controversies during Rambukwella's tenure — including the import of contaminated immunoglobulin and a locally administered anaesthetic, bupivacaine, that was linked to patient deaths after being imported without NMRA registration; two of three implicated batches later failed quality checks. Health-sector trade unions have also alleged a separate case in which allegedly fake waiver-of-registration certificates were used to import Prednisone, and have accused the former minister of concealing or delaying evidence related to these importation scams. Professional medical bodies had raised concerns as early as February 2023 over the minister's push to bypass standard NMRA registration processes for certain drug imports, warning of exactly this kind of risk to patients.
The compensation scheme sits alongside a separate and much larger legal front. Multiple patients have pursued private claims well beyond the government's Rs. 1 million payouts. Kandapola resident Makkari Rajaratnam, who underwent cataract surgery at Nuwara Eliya General Hospital on 5 April 2023 and was advised to use the Prednisolone Acetate drops as part of his recovery , sent a Letter of Demand seeking Rs. 100 million from Rambukwella and eight others, before escalating to a Colombo District Court lawsuit in which three patients jointly sought Rs. 300 million from Rambukwella, former Health Ministry Secretary Janaka Chandraguptha, National Medicine Regulatory Authority officials, the Director General of Health Services, Chamee Chemist, Indiana Ophthalmics, and the Attorney General.
A separate group of six Nuwara Eliya-area patients — from Nuwara Eliya, Harasabadda, Bandarawela, Dunukedeniya and Welimada — filed their own Letters of Demand seeking Rs. 100 million each , naming largely the same set of officials and institutions as defendants.
The scale of the private claims — running into the hundreds of millions of rupees against named individuals — stands in sharp contrast to the government's flat Rs. 1 million administrative compensation, and is likely to keep pressure on the courts to determine whether the state's payout scheme forecloses, or merely supplements, patients' rights to sue for damages. Set against the broader record of substandard-drug controversies during the same ministerial tenure, the case remains a live regulatory and accountability question: it touches procurement and quality-control failures at the NMRA, hospital dispensing practices, and the personal liability of the minister and health officials who held office when the drug was distributed.
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by (2026-07-07 16:59:54)
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