Government policies and administrative structures had a critical role to play in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sri Lanka and India, says a study by a group of Sri Lankan and foreign scholars.
The group comprised Wilfried Swenden, Papia Sengupta, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, Aardra Surendran and Kanchana N. Ruwanpura.
Their view is delineated in a paper entitled: State Capacity, Ideology and the Management of COVID-19 in South Asia: India and Sri Lanka in Perspective in the Journal of South Asian Development.
Economic Context
The COVID-19 pandemic has to be seen in the economic context in which it struck Sri Lanka and India, the researchers submit. Before the pandemic hit, India and Sri Lanka were already economically dwindling, they point out.
“Between 2017 and 2019, the Indian growth rate slipped to below 7% and 5%, respectively. Sri Lanka’s growth rate dropped below 4% and 2%, in 2017–2018 and 2019 (World Bank, 2022). Sri Lanka’s debt levels were already perilous and aggravated during the pandemic, resulting in its declaration of bankruptcy in 2022 (CBSL, 2022),” the authors note.
Add to this the economic policies of the two countries. Although both countries were committed to economic liberalization, neo-liberalism had impacted provisions for health and labour protection. This was more in India than in Sri Lanka, the authors point out.
The administrative structures too had a crucial role to play. In contrast to the Sri Lankan Provinces, the Indian States had greater autonomy in formulating health and labour policies due to the federal elements in the Indian constitution. Indian federalism, though inadequate, had created space for the development of State-level health and labour regimes, which sometimes surpassed the national standard, the authors point out.
On the contrary, Sri Lanka lacked this flexibility because of its Unitary Constitution. The devolution of power under the inadequately implemented 13 th. Constitutional amendment (13A), gave the Provinces little or no elbow room to fashion their own COVID containment policies and programs. This was so despite Health being in the Concurrent List in the 13A devolution scheme.
Additionally, the inadequacy of fiscal federalism under 13A thwarted the full realization of the benefits of the devolution scheme envisaged by 13A.
The other vital difference between the COVID-management structure in Sri Lanka and India was the role assigned to the military in Sri Lanka. It took away quite a lot of responsibilities from the civil administration. The deployment only reinforced the already centralized COVID-19 management structure put up by the government. The military’s role also came at the expense of parliament and the people’s representatives at various levels, the authors say.
In India, on the other hand, despite the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s “remarkable concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office,” centralization was “lower” than in Sri Lanka.
In Sri Lanka, the directly elected President had much too much power vis-à-vis parliament. The concentration of power in the hands of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was further reinforced by the accumulation of power in the hands of the larger Rajapaksa family. This was so until Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country following the mass agitation in mid-2022 known as Aragalaya.
“This concentration of power contributed to the partial sidelining of health officials in leading the pandemic response and weakened the advantages of Sri Lanka’s public health system and labor protection,” the authors of the paper say.
Reduced Allocations for Health
The inherited capacity of the Sri Lankan State in national health infrastructure, and the stronger commitment to State intervention in social welfare, had generated the most effective response during the onset of the pandemic in South Asia, the paper acknowledges.
But still, the allocation for Health in budgets was, and had been, inadequate. The average annual public expenditure on health as a percentage of the GDP had declined from a peak of 2.13% during 1960–1969 to 1.33% during 2010–2017, the paper points out.
Both Sri Lanka and India had adopted “lockdowns” as a means of containing the pandemic. But the lockdowns were milder in Sri Lanka as compared to India. Sri Lanka also had sufficient facilities for treating infected patients. Furthermore, it quickly put in place testing and escalated contact tracing efforts, coupled with public awareness campaigns on prevention, the authors note.
Welfare Measures
Sri Lanka also made an effort to protect workers’ rights and safeguard livelihoods, the authors say. They point out that a tripartite agreement between the government, labor unions and the Employers’ Federation of Ceylon (EFC) was in place by May 2020. This assured that workers in the private sector would be paid 50% of their basic salary or Rs.14,500 per month, whichever is higher, during the curfew and lockdown due to the pandemic.
Also, the Termination of Employment of Workmen (Special Provisions) Act, No. 45 of 1971 (and amendments) was changed through an extraordinary gazette notification on 25 February 2021. Its aim was to double the compensation in the event of involuntary termination of employment to Rs.2.5 million from the earlier amount of Rs.1.25 million.
According to the authors, compared to India, the contraction of the Sri Lankan economy was less severe, although tourism, tea exports and remittances were severely affected, straining external debt repayments and leading to sovereign default in April 2022.
Tax cuts by the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government also reduced government income. The total government revenue plus grants as a proportion of the GDP dropped from 12.7% in 2019 to 9.1% in 2020 and 8.7% in 2021. This reduced the fiscal space for increased public expenditure on the pandemic.
In India, without the same level of labor protection as in Sri Lanka, 120 million job losses were reported within the first few months of the lockdown.
Advantage of Federalism
In terms of State capacity, Sri Lanka was better placed to respond to the pandemic. But India had other advantages. The federal structure there provided opportunities for regional variations in the provisioning of welfare. States with the strongest welfare tradition like Kerala and Delhi under the Aam Admi Party, for example, were able to add to the Central government’s stimulus packages. However, in contrast to Kerala and the other Southern States, some Northern States like Haryana, Gujarat, lagged behind.
“Kerala provided social welfare pensions, offered relief to laborers due to job loss as well as free food kits with 17 essential items to every household from March 2020. More than 1,100 community kitchens were started under 1,034 local self-government authorities reaching nearly half the state’s population. The state also added to its health insurance and literacy policies, protecting its large number of migrant workers.”
“Comparable policies were formulated in Delhi even though the implementation thereof encountered stronger resistance from the Centre, given Delhi’s constitutional status as a Union Territory and not a full-fledged state,” the authors point out.
The authors conclude with a warning. Heroic as the efforts to contain the damage of the pandemic may have been in both Sri Lanka and India, its consequences “may have enduring regressive implications for the laboring classes.”
However, public protests (like the Aragalaya in Sri Lanka) suggest that the “erosion of the social floor will be staunchly contested and resisted.”
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