“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Peter Drucker

By Prof. Asoka S.Seneviratne

Introduction

Sri Lanka has never been without industrial policy. For decades, successive governments have attempted, in different forms, to promote manufacturing, protect domestic industries, attract foreign investment, develop exports, create employment and move the economy towards higher value-added production. Yet the country has struggled to transform these individual initiatives into a sustained process of industrial upgrading.

This raises a fundamental question: why has Sri Lanka found it so difficult to convert industrial policy into industrial transformation?

A recent International Monetary Fund working paper provides a particularly useful framework for examining this question. Rather than viewing industrial policy simply as a collection of subsidies, tariffs, tax concessions or government programmes, the IMF paper focuses on the institutional capacity required to make industrial policy work. Its central framework is the “4A” model: Ambition-Agency, Autonomy, Accountability and Adaptability.

This framework provides an opportunity to look at Sri Lanka’s industrial experience through a different lens.

The deeper issue is whether the institutions implementing those policies possessed the characteristics required to learn, coordinate, discipline, experiment, and adapt.

This question has become particularly important today.

Sri Lanka has spent the past several years dealing with an extraordinary economic crisis. Macroeconomic stabilisation, fiscal consolidation, debt restructuring, reserve accumulation and monetary discipline have been necessary foundations for recovery. But stability is not the same thing as transformation.

The next stage must therefore be different.

Sri Lanka now needs to move from stabilising the economy to transforming its productive capacity. This is why the 2027 Budget should not be regarded merely as another annual exercise in taxation and expenditure. It should become a Budget for Economic Transformation, with industrial policy at its centre.

The IMF’s 4A framework helps explain both Sri Lanka’s past difficulties and what institutional changes may be required for the future.

Sri Lanka’s Industrial Policy Has a Long History — But Not a Continuous Transformation

Sri Lanka’s industrial-policy experience can broadly be understood through several different phases.

Before 1977, the country followed a strongly interventionist development model. (i) Import substitution, (ii) quantitative restrictions, (iii) state enterprises, (iv) licensing, and (v) protection were used to encourage domestic production and reduce dependence on imports.

The objective was understandable: build domestic productive capacity. But protection alone does not necessarily create international competitiveness.

An industry can survive behind tariff walls without becoming productive enough to compete internationally. Domestic firms may acquire production capacity while remaining dependent on imported technology, protected markets and administrative support.

The economic liberalisation that began in 1977 represented a major change. Sri Lanka moved towards greater openness, private investment, export orientation and integration with international markets.

This created important successes.

The development of the apparel industry is perhaps the clearest example. Export-oriented manufacturing, foreign investment, the free-trade-zone model and integration into global production networks created employment and foreign-exchange earnings.

Yet another question emerged: why did this success not generate a much broader transformation of Sri Lanka’s industrial structure?

The country developed internationally competitive pockets of production, but industrial diversification remained limited. Manufacturing did not generate the scale of technological upgrading seen in some successful East Asian economies such as S. Korea & Japan.

The lesson is therefore not simply that protection failed and liberalisation succeeded. That would be too simplistic.

The more important lesson is that neither protection nor liberalisation, by themselves, constitute an industrial strategy.

Successful industrialisation requires institutions capable of (i) identifying opportunities, (ii) coordinating investment, (iii) encouraging technological upgrading, (iv) demanding performance and (v) changing policies when they do not work.

That brings Sri Lanka directly to the IMF’s 4A framework.

Ambition and Agency: Does Sri Lanka Know What It Wants to Become?

The first question for an industrial policy is not how much money the Government should spend. It is: what kind of economy does Sri Lanka want to become?

Ambition means having a clear development objective. Agency means having an institution capable of translating that ambition into coordinated action. Sri Lanka has often had ambitious policy statements.

There have been plans for export development, industrialization, investment promotion, technology development, regional industrialization and value-added production. More recently, the government has articulated objectives to raise manufacturing’s contribution to GDP, increase merchandise exports and strengthen industrial competitiveness.

The National Export Development Plan 2026–2030, for example, places export expansion, diversification and integration into global value chains at the centre of the country’s trade strategy, with a stated ambition of total exports of US$36 billion by 2030, including US$28 billion in merchandise exports.

The Ministry of Industry has separately set a target of increasing manufacturing’s contribution to GDP from 16.4% in 2024 to 20% by 2030 and merchandise exports from US$12.7 billion to US$28 billion.

These are significant ambitions.

But ambition becomes meaningful only when accompanied by agency.

The IMF’s argument is important here. Successful industrial policy requires a leading institution capable of accumulating sector-specific knowledge, learning from markets, coordinating policies and continuously experimenting with different approaches. This is precisely where Sri Lanka’s institutional fragmentation becomes important.

Industrial development involves finance, trade, taxation, energy, ports, customs, skills, land, technology, infrastructure, research and development and foreign investment. If each ministry and agency operates independently, an industrial strategy can become a collection of disconnected programmes.

Sri Lanka therefore needs more than another policy document.

It needs an institutional agency capable of implementing the policy.

The proposed Industry Transformation and Innovation Authority is potentially relevant to this institutional question. The Government has been working towards consolidating existing industrial and enterprise-development institutions into a more integrated authority.

But establishing an institution is only the beginning.

The real test will be whether it has the authority, expertise and institutional independence to coordinate policy across government and to learn from the private sector and international markets.

Autonomy: Industrial Policy Must Serve the Economy, Not Individual Interests

The second “A” is autonomy.

This is one of the most important lessons for Sri Lanka.

Industrial policy necessarily involves government intervention. But intervention can produce two very different outcomes.

In one case, government works with firms to solve genuine coordination failures, develop infrastructure, promote technology, and enter new markets.

In another, policies become instruments for protecting inefficient firms, distributing privileges or maintaining politically connected interests.

The difference is institutional.

Autonomy does not mean that policymakers should operate without democratic accountability. It means that an industrial-policy institution must have sufficient professional independence to make decisions based on economic evidence rather than short-term pressure from individual firms or interest groups.

Sri Lanka’s historical experience demonstrates why this matters.

Protection can sometimes be necessary during the early development of an industry. But protection without performance requirements can become permanent.

The crucial question should therefore be: What does an industry have to achieve in return for government support?

If a firm receives assistance, should it increase exports?

Should productivity rise?

Should local value addition increase?

Should technology be transferred?

Should workers acquire new skills?

Should the firm penetrate new markets?

Should the support expire after a defined period?

These are not merely technical questions. They determine whether industrial policy becomes a mechanism for productive transformation or permanent protection.

A future Sri Lankan industrial policy should therefore be conditional, transparent and measurable.

Government support should not be regarded as an entitlement.

It should be regarded as an investment by the nation in productive capacity.

Accountability: Industrial Policy Must Be Judged by Results

The third “A” — accountability — may be the most important lesson of all.

Sri Lanka has historically produced numerous plans, institutions and incentives. But the country has not always maintained a sufficiently rigorous mechanism for asking whether those interventions actually delivered the intended results.

An industrial policy should therefore establish measurable performance indicators from the beginning.

The question should not be:

How much did the Government allocate?

The question should be:

What economic transformation resulted from the allocation?

This changes the entire philosophy of policymaking.

For example, an industrial programme should be judged by whether it increases:

productivity;

exports;

investment;

technological capability;

domestic value addition;

skilled employment;

research and development;

foreign-exchange earnings; and

real household incomes.

This approach is directly connected to the broader argument I have made about Sri Lanka’s 2027 Budget.

The success of Budget 2027 should not be judged solely by revenue collection or expenditure control. Those are important instruments of fiscal management. But the ultimate test must be whether public policy increases the economy’s productive capacity. A country cannot tax its way into prosperity.

Nor can it borrow its way into prosperity. Nor can monetary stability by itself create a productive economy.

The sustainable answer must ultimately be higher productivity, greater investment, stronger exports and higher real incomes.

This is why industrial policy belongs at the heart of the transformation agenda.

Adaptability: Sri Lanka Must Learn from What Does Not Work

The fourth “A” is adaptability.

This may be the most difficult characteristic for a government bureaucracy.

Industrial development takes place in an uncertain world. Technologies change. Consumer preferences change. Global supply chains change. Trade agreements change. Energy prices change. Artificial intelligence is changing production itself.

A policy that was appropriate ten years ago may be completely inappropriate today.

Therefore, successful industrial policy cannot be a five-year document that remains unchanged regardless of circumstances.

It must be a learning system. If a programme fails, government should be able to modify it. If an industry does not become competitive after receiving support, assistance should be reconsidered. If a new technology creates an opportunity, policy should respond quickly.

If a global value chain becomes accessible to Sri Lankan firms, infrastructure and skills policy should adjust accordingly. This is where the IMF’s institutional approach becomes particularly relevant.

The IMF paper argues that successful industrial-policy institutions accumulate knowledge through continuous experimentation and feedback from markets. Sri Lanka needs precisely such a mechanism.

The private sector should not simply be treated as a recipient of government policy. It should become an important source of information about international markets, technology, production costs, skills shortages and emerging opportunities.

Government, in turn, must retain the capacity to distinguish between genuine information and requests for permanent protection.

That is the institutional challenge.

From Industrial Policy to Economic Transformation: The 2027 Budget Test

This brings Sri Lanka to the most important question.

What should industrial policy achieve in the next stage of Sri Lanka’s economic development?

The answer cannot simply be to increase the number of factories.

Sri Lanka needs a transformation in the quality and productivity of production.

This means moving from relatively low-value production towards higher-value manufacturing and services; from imported technology towards greater domestic technological capability; from fragmented small enterprises towards globally connected SMEs; and from dependence on a narrow range of exports towards diversified and sophisticated export production.

The Government’s own 2026 Budget has recognised the importance of productivity, innovation, private-sector investment, export diversification and global value-chain integration, while setting an objective of sustained growth above 7% within the next few years.

The challenge is now implementation. This is where Budget 2027 becomes critical. The Budget should connect macroeconomic stability with a coherent national transformation programme.

The first mission should be raising productivity.

That requires investment in technology, automation, artificial intelligence, energy efficiency, logistics, digitalisation, research and development and workforce skills.

The second mission should be mobilising investment.

Macroeconomic stability is essential, but stability alone does not automatically produce investment. Sri Lanka needs predictable regulation, faster approvals, better infrastructure, deeper capital markets, stronger public-private partnerships and a genuine single-window investment mechanism.

The third mission should be improving living standards.

Industrial transformation is ultimately about people.

If productivity increases but real wages do not improve, if exports increase but employment quality does not improve, or if growth is concentrated without broader income gains, transformation remains incomplete.

The objective must therefore be an economy capable of generating higher productivity, higher real wages and higher household incomes. But this transformation cannot be meaningful to ordinary households if the cost of living continues to rise faster than their incomes. Keeping the cost of living manageable must therefore be a fundamental objective of economic policy, so that higher productivity and incomes translate into genuine improvements in living standards.

The above assertion is fundamentally important for policymakers.

Sri Lanka’s New Industrial Policy Must Be Different from the Old One

Sri Lanka should therefore avoid two extremes.

The first is a return to indiscriminate protectionism.

The second is the assumption that markets alone will automatically generate the industrial transformation the country needs.

The experience of successful Asian economies suggests a more sophisticated approach.

The state must create the conditions for private investment and competition, while actively addressing coordination failures that individual firms cannot solve alone.

That means infrastructure. It means reliable and competitively priced energy. It means efficient ports and logistics. It means modern customs systems. It means technical and vocational education linked directly to industry. It means research and development. It means access to finance for productive investment. It means export-market intelligence. It means integration into global value chains.

And it means institutions capable of continuously evaluating whether these interventions are actually working.

Sri Lanka’s geographical position provides an important opportunity. The country can combine manufacturing with logistics, maritime services, tourism, digital services, agriculture and knowledge-intensive exports.

But geography is an opportunity, not a strategy. A strategy requires institutions. That is why the 4A model is so relevant.

Sri Lanka needs ambition to define where it wants to go; agency to coordinate the journey; autonomy to prevent industrial policy from becoming captured by narrow interests; accountability to measure whether public support produces results; and adaptability to change course when circumstances change.

Stability Is the Foundation — Transformation Is the Destination

Sri Lanka’s economic crisis has taught the country a painful but important lesson: macroeconomic instability can destroy decades of development. The stabilisation process was therefore unavoidable.

Fiscal discipline, monetary stability, debt restructuring, reserve accumulation and stronger institutions provide the foundation upon which the next stage of development must be built.

But foundations are not buildings. Stability is necessary. It is not sufficient.

The next challenge is economic transformation.

This is why Sri Lanka’s industrial-policy debate should no longer be confined to the traditional question of whether the Government should intervene more or intervene less.

The more important question is:

Can Sri Lanka build institutions capable of making intervention smarter, more disciplined, more accountable and more adaptable?

The IMF’s 4A framework offers a valuable way of asking that question.

Sri Lanka’s historical experience suggests that industrial policy can create capacity without competitiveness, protection without productivity, and institutions without sufficient coordination. The experience also shows that openness can generate remarkable export successes without necessarily producing broad-based industrial diversification.

The lesson is therefore not to choose between the state and the market. It is to build a state that can work intelligently with competitive markets. That is the real challenge for Budget 2027.

Sri Lanka should not use the 2027 Budget simply to consolidate the achievements of stabilisation. It should use those achievements as the platform for the next stage — raising productivity, mobilising investment, diversifying exports, developing technology, upgrading skills and increasing real household incomes.

The country’s current industrial and export strategies already contain important ambitions. The National Export Development Plan seeks substantial expansion and diversification of exports, while the Government’s industrial strategy aims to raise manufacturing’s contribution to GDP and merchandise exports by 2030.

The decisive issue, however, will not be the targets themselves.

It will be institutional capacity to deliver them.

Sri Lanka therefore needs to move from an era of policies to an era of policy learning; from protection to performance; from isolated projects to coordinated transformation; and from short-term programmes to a sustained national productivity strategy.

The IMF’s 4A model provides a useful institutional lens.

Sri Lanka’s own experience provides the evidence. And Budget 2027 provides the opportunity.

The ultimate objective should be nothing less than a transformation from an economy that has repeatedly struggled to recover from crises into an economy capable of sustaining high productivity, competitive exports, productive investment and rising real living standards. That is the point at which stability becomes meaningful.

Stability should not be the destination of Sri Lanka’s economic journey. It should be the platform from which transformation begins.

As Peter Drucker reminds us, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” For Sri Lanka, the time has come to create that future through a new generation of disciplined, accountable and adaptive industrial policy.

(The writer served as the Special Advisor to the President of Namibia from 2006 to 2012 and was a Senior Consultant with the UNDP for 20 years. He was a Senior Economist with the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (1972-1993). He can be reached via asoka.seneviratne@gmail.com.)

Reference

:

IMF Working Paper

Institutions for Industrial Policy: The Foundation of Economic Development -Prepared by Reda Cherif, Fuad Hasanov, Gary Xie

March 2026

(Excerpted from Madame-Sir, the autobiography of Manel Abeysekera)

On my return home from Oxford, I felt I should look around for a job. The first offer I had was made by Mr. J.L.M. Fernando, the then Chairman of Air Ceylon, who urged me to apply for an Executive Post with the Airline. I was about to do so when my eye caught a notification in the Ceylon Daily News, reproducing a Gazette notice calling for applications for the Ceylon Overseas Service (COS). Reading down the lines, a particular requirement set me thinking. It was that a married woman must obtain special permission of the Public Service Commission to join the Service. This made me realize that women could apply for a Service which had hitherto been a male bastion because recruitment was through the Civil Service Minute and Examination in which, as I have said earlier, the word “Man” did not embrace “Woman”.

So I obtained my parents’ permission to apply. I believe that Mother gave hers not really expecting me to be selected [no mother likes a daughter to go out into the world] while Father gave his in the fervent hope that I would be selected as that would be the next best thing to following in his footsteps and being in his own Ceylon Civil Service which I could not, being a woman. I remembered the Indian Foreign Service joke about our Foreign Service and hoped I could prove them wrong! I also hoped to do what Dame Janet wanted me to do and do what my women Indian Foreign Service friends were doing.

What I learnt after I joined the COS was that Mr. S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike, when he became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence and External Affairs in 1956, wanted young people to join the COS for its own sake as he himself was extremely interested in foreign affairs and, as in his domestic policy, desired to steer a new course which he believed would be for the good of the country. He had already changed our foreign policy of following British norms and practice and established relations with Eastern Europe, China, Africa, Latin America and the other countries of the Non Aligned Movement.

I was first interviewed by a panel of three Permanent Secretaries of which the Chairman was the Secretary of the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs, Mr. Gunesena de Soyza, who was subsequently appointed High Commissioner to Britain and who had earlier accompanied Mrs. Bandaranaike to Oxford as recounted by me. The other two were Mr.Alvapillai and Mr. Shelton Fernando. They welcomed me as the first woman to be interviewed for the service.

I recall Mr. Alvapillai being rather inclined to think that, since my parents had taken me abroad as shown in my application, I had acquired a taste for travel and wanted to see the rest of the world through the COS. When he enquired if that was so, I rather cheekily said that if I did want to merely travel abroad more, [there were no Exchange Control restrictions on obtaining foreign exchange for travel then], I could do so at father’s cost and not run the risks and hazards of the COS to do so. Again, when I was asked whether, should they take me in and train me at government cost, what would be the case if I decided to get married and leave the Service, it really put my back up and was perhaps the first time I felt a feminist! My reply was that any man they recruited could also leave at will and that there was no stipulation in the conditions of the Service that a woman could not marry and remain in the Service and that the choice was left to me and whoever I married!

I feel that my candour perhaps got me in, thanks to the fairness of the panel which did not resent my frank responses. [Initially, the India Foreign Service had the requirement that female officers had to retire on marriage and my IFS friend from Somerville Mira Malik, who was quite brilliant, had to do so though not so my other friend Soonu Kapadia who may have married later after the rule was rescinded. I like to think that I saved my female colleagues from the fate that befell Mira.

Mr Shelton Fernando, who had been up at Oxford, asked me whether I had not been tempted to caricature some of my lecturers and I am not surprised he did so as many of them were ideal subjects but, as I told him, I did not have the talent for it! I was also asked some foreign affairs questions which were not difficult to answer. The Chairman, Mr. Soyza had subsequently told Father that he had not seen such fine certificates as my Somerville Principal and Tutors had given me, for a long time-no doubt that they would have gone a long way in getting me into the COS and I am deeply grateful to them.

Next came the Public Service Commission interview. But before it, Mr. Eardley Gunewardena, Secretary to the Commission had called (my brother) Lakshman as a friend, to enquire whether I was really serious about wanting to join the COS, because I was the only woman who had qualified for interview and it would be a waste of the Commission’s time if I was not really keen. Lakshman informed him that I was quite serious about it as I had got my parents’ approval to apply for the Service.

This interview was more formal and less formidable than the previous one by the three Permanent Secretaries and I was fortunate to pass it and qualify for appointment to the COS as the first woman to do so. The medical examination that followed included a VD test which Mother strongly felt was degrading for me and I recall Father explaining to her that it was a rule that had to be complied

with and was no reflection on me! In order to pacify her, he said he would accompany me to the clinic so that everyone would see that I was not going there in secret!

Although I was rather quiet with people I did not know and my male colleagues did not quite know what to make of this puduma satha, they soon found out that I could take quite a lot of teasing and also give as good as I got! So we got on famously especially my batch of seven “Samurai” and me, who had busted the male bastion and become the first woman in the COS.

Briefings

The first “pep” talk we got was from the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Mr. Gunasena de Soyza. Something he said on that occasion has always remained with me. He informed us that we had been selected on certain criteria and for some special aptitude and individuality which the selectors had seen in us which they felt would be good for the Service. So he cautioned us that the Service did not expect us to become some kind of stereotype and that we should be ourselves and not think that even a cocktail party meant having a drink in one hand and making polite conversation alone they were intended to be avenues to make useful contacts, to engage in business where possible in a friendly, sociable way.

One of my batch mates’ name was Maurice Rabot and Mr. Soyza’s parting shot was: “I do not want the Rabots of the Service to become robots!” Anyway, I do not think that any of my batch mates could have ever become stereotypical diplomats as we were far too individualtistic for that! However, (my brother) Lakshman fondly called me a “diplomutt” and I do not think he would have called me that if I really were one; or rather I would like to think so!

Our next important briefing was by the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence and External Affairs himself, Mr. SWRD Bandaranaike. Before going to the Ministry that morning Father who had worked with the Premier as Commissioner of Local Government and later as Permanent Secretary when he was the Minister of Health and Local Government in the first Government at Independence under Premier Mr. D.S Senanayake as I have recounted, knowing him well, predicted that he would be in a bad frame of mind as he had placed senior members of the Federal Party, including Dr. E.M.V Naganathan, its Secretary, under house arrest and that it may impact on our meeting with him.

As we were about to enter the Premier’s Conference Room, my colleagues who had hitherto not politely stood aside for me as a woman now did so as they expected that then I would have to sit next to the Premier! But, when I entered the room and saw Mr. Soyza seated next to him I boldly walked up and sat next to Mr. Soyza causing one of my colleagues to have to sit next to the Premier!

How right Father was! The Premier made short shrift of us. Luckily he directed his question to my colleague seated on his left (where all of them had failed to manoeuver me!); he was asked to define his foreign policy and, before the poor man could stutter anything out, the Premier went on to the next and to the next! Finally, he sternly bade us read the recently published book on it and come back in a week’s time and we were only too glad to make our escape!

When the appointed day arrived, Father became the oracle again! This time he predicted that the Premier would be in a relaxed, expansive mood as the Federal Party members had been released and how right he was! As we walked in and sat down at the conference table, the Premier turned to Mr. Soyza and remarked: “Gunasena, I see you have taken a woman into the Service and that you are going to train them in foreign languages: I do hope the Tower of Babel will not become one of babble!” Everyone laughed including myself, suppressing the thought, “so much for gender equality and equity”, since my colleagues chattered as much as I did! His next remark was even more pointed: he asked Mr. Soyza “Who is the famous woman in international affairs with enormous fat legs?”

Of course it was Ms. Golda Meir, Foreign Minister of Israel at the time and later Prime Minister. Wasn’t I glad that my saree covered my own legs which I considered shapely “gams” in Hollywood jargon! I always thought that God had a sense of humour seeing that He had given me small hands and feet with what was in between being quite out of proportion! After Mother’s death as Father was heartbroken, he and I went on a trip to the Holy Land and, when we were in Israel [for which we had to have a separate passport so as not to have any evidence of it in the Arab countries], Father was invited to an Evening Reception by Foreign Minister Golda Meir to which I accompanied him where there were several dignitaries from Africa.

Each invitee was asked to stand to be introduced to the others and Father was introduced as the “Little Boy Scout from Ceylon”! But what fascinated me were her legs which were just as our Premier had described them! I also recall meeting Mr. Bandaranaike at a wedding reception and his speaking to me in French which he knew I would have learn to speak at Oxford for my Modern History course and my just getting away with it by replying that I was good at understanding French though not at speaking it. To my relief, he replied “Moi aussi”, meaning, ” Me too”!

Training

After these jokes, to my great relief, the Premier went on to discuss foreign affairs and his policy of non-alignment for Ceylon. These were the days of Sputniks and astronauts and the Premier had decided to give our batch [probably the first intake after he became Premier and Minister of Defence and External Affairs a really good training. In Parliament he stated that we should rise like Sputniks]. Perhaps he may have had ideas on how we should be placed as, except myself, all the others were over the normal maximum age for the joint Civil and Overseas Examination and maybe he thought we should be placed at a step higher than the first step of the Service depending on how we fared in our training. Be that as it may, we were assigned foreign languages and were to be sent to Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities to study them as well as diplomatic history, international relations, international law and other related subjects.

In my case, the assigning of a language and getting placement in a British University proved amusing. We were asked to indicate our first, second and third preferences from French, Italian, German, Russian and Chinese and I gave my choice as Chinese, Russian and German with an eye on being assigned to those countries, little knowing that logic did not always prevail in Foreign Services! I was first assigned German and then, for reasons unknown to me, I was assigned Italian. Now when the languages had first been assigned, the Foreign Ministry official entrusted with obtaining placements had got them and, when the languages were re-assigned, naturally re-assigned the names against the placements that had been obtained.

I was assigned Balliol College, Oxford, which the poor man was unaware was a men’s College [Oxford and Cambridge Colleges became co-ed comparatively recently] My batch mate Mahen Vaithianathan [son of Sir Kanthiah Vaithianathan, the first Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs] who had been a year senior to me at Balliol and who had a puckish sense of humour, had taken the letter addressed to me as I happened to be on leave when they were handed out and, with great amusement, handed it to me the next day. It said, in typical “officialese” that I “should proceed to Balliol College, Oxford to study Italian”.

Equally amused as he, I took the letter to my senior colleague in charge of Overseas assignments, Arthur Basnayake of the first batch of officers and, with a very straight face, told him that I could not possibly “proceed to Balliol” although I would love to do so as Balliol had some showers as opposed to the rather unhygienic, traditional “English bathtubs”. Arthur was quite puzzled and asked me why not, especially as I had been at Oxford already.

My reply was that that was precisely why not and laughingly explained that Balliol would not have me as I was a woman! He laughed heartily and in a confidential whisper told me not to tell the press and of course I did not! The Ministry then quickly made amends and looked for a place and found one at New Hall [since -2008 re-named Murray Edwards College after its distinguished Founder President Dame Rosemary Murray – under whom I was privileged to be an alumnae – and the Refounders who made the endowment for its expansion]. I was delighted at not only having the joy of being at Cambridge but also because it was renowned for its School of Modern Languages. So I “proceeded to New Hall” to enter the Michaelmas [autumn] Term for one academic year.

Before we went abroad to our respective Colleges at the Universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge, we were sent to some of the important Government Departments relevant to our work such as Immigration and Emigration, Commerce, Tourism et al to orient us to their work and their relevance to our own work. Unfortunately, we were not able to go out into the provinces to be oriented to Kachcheri work as civil strife had broken out over the Tamil language issue. In the Ministry, our superb Consellor of training was the witty Glannie Peries who, I believe, was a Civil Servant who “manned” the Ministry before specific recruitment was made to it but preferred to continue in the foreign service. He imparted to us the finer points of foreign affairs including conduct at cocktail parties to which he had us invited for the purpose.

Awareness for prevention

Dr. Niroshan Gamage
Director
National Anti – Rabies Campaign & Public Health Veterinary Services
Ministry of Health

Every year on 28 September, the world marks the anniversary of the death of Louis Pasteur, the scientist who gave humanity its first weapon against rabies. More than a century later, the weapon still works, and yet the disease still kills. In Sri Lanka, that quiet contradiction is the reason this year’s national theme is not a slogan about cure, but a call to action about prevention: Awareness for Prevention. Because in the story of rabies, the single most powerful drug is not found in a vaccine phial It is found in knowledge -the knowledge of what to do in the first fifteen minutes after a bite, and the will to act on it without hesitation. This is the story of how that knowledge, translated into a century of public health effort, has brought one small island nation to the very edge of eliminating one of humanity’s oldest and most feared diseases.

DISEASE OLDER THAN MEMORY

Few diseases have haunted the human imagination as persistently as rabies. For more than four thousand years, across nearly every continent, it has been recorded, feared, and mythologised the origin, some historians argue, of ancient legends about wolves, were wolves and the walking dead. Today, thanks to more than a century of vaccine science beginning with Pasteur’s 1885 breakthrough, rabies has been eliminated from Western Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea and parts of Latin America. Yet, it remains stubbornly endemic across large parts of Africa and Asia, killing tens of thousands of people every year most recent global estimates place the toll at over 44,000 annual deaths, a figure that public health authorities widely regard as a significant undercount given weak surveillance and routine misdiagnosis in the regions hit hardest.

The pattern of who dies is as telling as how many. Rabies is classified by the World Health Organization as a neglected tropical disease, and its victims are overwhelmingly the world’s poorest and most rural populations. More than eighty percent of cases occur in communities with little or no access to health education or post-bite treatment. Roughly four in every ten deaths are children under fifteen, small enough to be bitten while playing, and too young to know that a stray dog’s affectionate lick on a scraped knee can be a death sentence. The global economic toll, including medical costs, lost income and lost lives, is estimated at around US$ 8.6 billion a year. And in almost every case, the tragedy is one that modern medicine had already solved: 99 percent of human rabies cases trace back to the bite of a single, identifiable, preventable source – the domestic dog.

This is what makes rabies almost unique among fatal diseases. Once the virus reaches the central nervous system and symptoms begin, death follows in essentially 100 percent of cases; there is no cure, no rescue, no second chance. And yet the same disease is close to 100 percent preventable, provided the chain of prevention, wound care, timely treatment, and animal vaccination is never broken. Sri Lanka’s experience over the past half-century is one of the clearest demonstrations in the world of exactly how that chain can be built, and how easily it can fray.

SRI LANKA’S 130-YEAR BATTLE

Sri Lanka’s legal engagement with rabies is remarkably old, predating most of the country’s modern public health institutions by decades. The Rabies Ordinance No. 7 of 1893, “An Ordinance to provide for the Suppression of Rabies”, came into force on 2 January 1894, making it one of the earliest pieces of public health legislation in the island’s history. Governor Sir William Hercules Robinson pushed the law through after a spate of rabies cases alarmed the colony, granting local authorities the power to seize stray dogs, destroy diseased or suspected animals, and restrict dog movement during outbreaks. Amended repeatedly across the following century, elements of that 1894 framework remain part of Sri Lankan law even today, a striking legal thread connecting the present-day campaign to the nineteenth century.

For decades, rabies control amounted to little more than ordinance enforcement and dog destruction, with limited scientific basis and limited effect. Real change arrived only after the Second World War, when the newly formed World Health Organization began sending technical consultants to what was then Ceylon. On the advice of WHO rabies specialist Dr Ernest S. Tierkel, a dedicated Veterinary Public Health Unit was established under the Ministry of Health in 1953, the direct institutional ancestor of today’s Public Health Veterinary Services (PHVS), formally tasked with national rabies control since 1956.

The turning point came two decades later. In 1973, Sri Lanka recorded 377 human rabies deaths – the highest toll on record, and a national crisis that could no longer be managed through ordinance and culling alone. It became the trigger for the island-wide Rabies Eradication Program, launched in 1975 with WHO assistance and built, for the first time, on the modern pillars of mass dog vaccination, structured post-exposure treatment, and public education. From that peak, deaths fell below 100 by the late 1980s and have continued a broadly downward trend ever since interrupted, time and again, by periods of reduced funding or disrupted vaccination coverage that forced the programme to adapt.

HOW RABIES SPREADS

Rabies is a viral infection of the central nervous system, transmitted almost always through the saliva of an infected mammal typically via a bite, though scratches or licks on broken skin or mucous membranes such as the eyes or mouth can also carry the virus. The incubation period is unpredictable, typically two to three months but ranging from as little as one week to as long as a year, depending on factors including the location of the wound and the size of the viral dose. Early symptoms are deceptively generic: fever, general pain, and an unusual tingling or burning sensation at the site of the original wound. As the virus advances toward the brain and spinal cord, the disease progresses to one of two clinical forms.

Furious rabies, the more commonly recognised form, produces hyperactivity, agitation, hallucinations, and the hallmark symptoms of hydrophobia – a terror of water – and aerophobia, a fear of drafts of air, with death typically occurring within days from cardio-respiratory arrest. Paralytic rabies, accounting for roughly one in five human cases, follows a quieter but no less fatal course: muscles gradually become paralyzed starting from the wound site, a coma slowly develops, and death follows. Because it lacks the dramatic hallmark symptoms of the furious form, paralytic rabies is frequently misdiagnosed, contributing to the systematic under-reporting of the disease worldwide.

Laboratory surveillance conducted by the Medical Research Institute over multiple study periods has consistently found that dogs account for roughly 85 to 97 percent of confirmed rabies-positive samples in Sri Lanka, with cats a distant second at somewhere between 2 and 8 percent. Cattle, goats and other livestock occasionally test positive, though usually after being bitten by a rabid dog rather than acting as an independent source of human infection. Wild carnivores chiefly mongooses, and more rarely civets and jackals account for only a small fraction of confirmed cases, though the confirmation of sylvatic, wildlife-cycle rabies in a civet in Moneragala District some years ago served as a reminder that a wildlife reservoir cannot be entirely ruled out. In practical terms, however, the domestic dog remains both the overwhelming source of the problem in Sri Lanka and the single most effective point of intervention. (See Figure 1)

THE FIVE PILLARS OF PREVENTION

If Sri Lanka’s public health message for World Rabies Day 2026 can be reduced to a single idea, it is this: prevention is not one action but a chain, and every link in that chain depends on people knowing what to do and acting immediately. Five pillars make up that chain — and every one of them begins, or ends, with awareness.

1. Wash First: The Single Most Powerful First Response

If Sri Lanka’s public is to remember one instruction this World Rabies Day, it should be this: immediately and thoroughly wash any bite or scratch wound with soap and running water for a full fifteen minutes. This single act, so simple that it costs nothing and requires no medical training, physically flushes and inactivates a significant proportion of the virus at the wound site before it can travel toward the nervous system. Povidone-iodine or a similar antiseptic can be applied afterward if available. Wound washing is not a substitute for medical care, it is the first, most time – critical step of it, and delay of even a few hours reduces its protective value. Every household, every school, every workplace in Sri Lanka should treat this instruction with the same reflexive urgency given to calling for an ambulance.

2. Seek PEP Without Hesitation

Washing the wound buys time; post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) is what completes the job. PEP is the emergency medical response administered after a bite, calibrated to the severity of exposure. Category I contact – licks on intact skin – requires no vaccination. Category II exposures, such as minor scratches or nibbling without bleeding, call for wound washing and immediate vaccination. Category III exposures – bites that break the skin, multiple wounds, or contamination of mucous membranes – require wound washing, a full vaccine course, and, where indicated, rabies immunoglobulin or monoclonal antibodies infiltrated directly into the wound. In Sri Lanka, this treatment is provided free of charge through government hospitals, under national clinical guidelines that have been refined since 2002. The message for the public must be unambiguous: any bite or scratch from a dog, cat, or other mammal, however minor it appears warrants an immediate visit to a health facility. Assuming a wound is “too small to matter” is the single most dangerous misjudgment a bite victim can make.

If You Are Bitten or Scratched

•Wash the wound immediately with soap and running water for 15 minutes.

•Apply povidone-iodine or an antiseptic if available – do not apply oil, chilies, herbs or other folk remedies.

•Go to the nearest government hospital without delay, even for a minor wound.

•Report the animal, if possible, for observation or testing.

•Complete the full course of vaccination exactly as prescribed – do not stop early.

3. Vaccinating the Source: Dogs Protect People

Treating bite victims saves individual lives; vaccinating dogs saves entire communities, because it interrupts transmission at its true source. Mass dog vaccination is recognised globally, and confirmed repeatedly in Sri Lanka’s own data, as the single most cost-effective rabies control intervention available. he national experience of the past decade makes the case with striking clarity.

The national vaccination and mortality figures for the past eleven years illustrate both the scale of the effort and its results (See Table 1):

The pattern is instructive. The dip in vaccinations around 2019–2021 – a period disrupted by economic crisis and pandemic-era resource constraints coincides with a rise in human deaths back toward thirty a year. The sharp recovery in 2023–2025, culminating in nearly 1.7 million dogs vaccinated in 2025, corresponds with the lowest death toll in the eleven-year series: just 14. Few relationships in Sri Lankan public health are documented this cleanly. Every dog vaccinated is a measurable unit of protection for the humans who share its street, its temple, and its schoolyard.

4. Managing the Dog Population, Humanely

Vaccination alone is not sufficient without a sustainable strategy for the free-roaming dog population that vaccination teams must repeatedly reach. Since 2007, Sri Lanka has followed a formal “No Kill” policy, replacing culling that long proven ineffective at controlling rabies with animal birth control through sterilization and, where appropriate, hormonal contraception. A stable, sterilized, and vaccinated dog population is easier to protect, easier to monitor, and far less likely to sustain a rabies transmission cycle than an unmanaged, rapidly reproducing one.

One of the more remarkable chapters in this pillar unfolded in Puttalam District, where oral rabies vaccination, a technique for immunizing dogs too wary or too free-roaming to be caught by injection teams was pioneered in Sri Lanka by Dr P. A. L. Harischandra. By 2003, the technique achieved more than 75 percent vaccination coverage in the district, offering a template later drawn upon elsewhere in the country for reaching the hardest population of all to access: the ownerless, free-roaming dog. Responsible pet ownership, leashing, confinement, and ensuring every owned dog is both vaccinated and sterilized remains the public’s essential personal contribution to this pillar.

5. Awareness: The Multiplier Behind Every Other Pillar

Wound washing, PEP-seeking behaviour, dog vaccination uptake, and responsible pet ownership share a common precondition: people must know what to do, and believe it matters enough to do it immediately. This is why Sri Lanka’s 2026 theme places awareness at the center rather than the margins. Public education in schools, in clinics, in community and religious gatherings, and increasingly through digital and social media teaches recognition of dog behaviour and bite risk, correct first-aid response, and the location of the nearest treatment facility. It replaces dangerous folk remedies with evidence-based action, and it converts a frightened bystander into a capable first responder within the critical first minutes after an exposure. Awareness does not compete with vaccines and antiserum for importance; it determines whether those tools are ever reached in time.

Every action taken in the first fifteen minutes after a bite is a life protected. Awareness is the tool that ensures that action is taken.

2025 vaccination figures, the highest in the eleven-year dataset, together with the lowest recorded death toll, reflect a period of renewed operational intensity for the anti-rabies campaign, following a difficult stretch during the years of economic constraint. Surveillance, though historically fragmented across PHVS, the Medical Research Institute, and the Department of Animal Production and Health, has gradually improved, notably with animal rabies becoming a notifiable disease in 2012 the human cases have been notifiable since 1971.

TOWARD ZERO BY 2030

In 2015, WHO, FAO and WOAH jointly set a global target of zero human deaths from dog-mediated rabies by 2030. Sri Lanka initially aimed higher, publicly committing in 2016 to eliminate human rabies deaths by 2020, a target later judged, along with those of other South Asian countries, to be unrealistic, and formally reset to the global 2030 horizon following a regional SARE (Stepwise Approach towards Rabies Elimination) assessment workshop held in Colombo in 2019.

Achieving that goal will require Sri Lanka to close several persistent gaps: fragmented data-sharing between PHVS, the Medical Research Institute and the Department of Animal Production and Health; incomplete and sometimes inconsistently funded sterilization coverage; and the unresolved institutional question raised again in the ongoing proposal to transfer rabies-control functions from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Lands and Irrigation a debate, ultimately, about which ministry is best placed to lead a disease that sits squarely at the intersection of animal and human health.

More than 130 years after the 1894 ordinance first gave the state the legal power to act against rabies, Sri Lanka is closer than it has ever been to eliminating human deaths from the disease. The 2025 figures record vaccination coverage and the lowest death toll on record offer genuine grounds for optimism. Whether that momentum can be sustained through to 2030 will depend on exactly the same ingredients that have driven every previous gain in this history: consistent funding, high dog-vaccination coverage, and institutional continuity for the agency tasked with carrying the work forward.

This World Rabies Day, the call to action is addressed to every household, school and community in Sri Lanka. Wash every wound. Seek treatment for every bite, however small. Vaccinate every dog, owned or community. Support humane, sustained population management. And talk about it because the awareness that reaches a neighbour, a child, or a stranger before the next bite occurs may be the single intervention that decides whether the story ends in recovery, or in tragedy.

Wash the wound. Seek PEP. Vaccinate your dog. Manage the population humanely. Spread awareness.

That is what “Awareness for Prevention” means and it is how Sri Lanka reaches zero.