By Rathindra Kuruwita

Eighteen months had passed since the first lockdown but the government had not put a system in place for public servants to work from home and ensure service delivery, Prof Manuj Weerasinghe, Head of the Department of Community Medicine, University of Colombo said yesterday.

The government should now at least use the current lockdown to introduce a system for government employees to work remotely in the long term, he said.

Prof. Weerasinghe said that many public servants still worked maintaining files and digitalisation was still not widespread.

“It has been 18 months since the first lockdown, and we still don’t have a system where government servants can work from home. If we had started the digitization process and worked from home protocols in 2020, a lockdown wouldn’t affect the service delivery of the government. In fact, the government could have saved tens of millions every day by keeping most of its employees at home. In New Zealand they have the systems in place and they immediately shutdown the country after they found one delta case, but the government sector didn’t shut down,” he said.

A few months ago, the government decided to bring back all government sector workers to office and there was a massive congestion in public transport and that too probably contributed to the spread of the virus, Prof. Weerasinghe said adding that once the current lockdown was over and offices resumed, buses and trains would be packed, which in turn would lead to more COVID cases.

“The transport system is a big problem. We had 18 months to set up a working public transport system and we had done nothing. Once the lockdown ends and buses are on the road, you will see that we are back at square one. It’s as if the last 18 months never happened,” he said.

Prof. Weerasinghe said the government as well as the general public believed that once the vaccination was over, the country could go back to what it was before COVID-19. Thus, there was no interest in setting up any system. Taking the example of problems in the food distribution system, Prof. Weerasinghe said that there was a crisis in food distribution during COVID-19 because our cooperative system had collapsed.

“Because of this we encouraged mobile trucks to distribute food. When the country was shut for a few months in 2020, a system of distribution was established where essential items were brought near people’s homes. When the country was opened the system died a natural death. When we had to shut down again, it took a few days to set this system up anew. Again, we see some mobile vendors on the road, are we going to let this system die once we lift the lockdown? Or are we going to formalize this so that people don’t need to move about much?” he asked.

Prof. Weerasinghe added that many countries in the world had learnt from COVID-19 and had changed their systems to be more resilient. A number of protocols, from introducing new technologies to remote working, had been introduced to make the system more efficient and resilient beyond the pandemic, he said.

“The world won’t go back to 2019. Neither should we. We must look at establishing systems where essential items are delivered home and promoting remote work. We must get along with the times,” he said.