Therefore, Nine provincial workshops were conducted for the authorized officers to cover all nine provinces in 2022. Each program was mainly divided into two parts. The first part was to create awareness and motivation to initiate tobacco-free zones and plan the tobacco-free zones. The second part was the enactment of the NATA act and it mainly focused on the training on how to proceed with legal actions against the NATA act violations and training on the newly initiated reporting system. For the legislation training, NATA was able to conduct raids to practice the enactment procedure against the NATA act violations. A newly developed VNATA mobile application for the Authorized officers (as a monitoring system) was introduced for all participants. IEC materials which were important for the initiation process of tobacco-free zones were distributed among the enthusiastic authorized offices.

 

While this provincial program, NATA got relevant steps to initiate 362 new tobacco-free zones by covering all MOH areas in Sri Lanka. All authorized officers around the identified area have agreed to support the PHI who charges that area. Now all prearrangements have been taken on to implement tobacco-free zones. Nearly 200 tobacco-free zones have already been created. Nearly another two hundred tobacco-free zones are still being prearranged. Within the next six months, all 362 tobacco-free zones will function properly.