Retraining For Growth

The purpose of this article is to suggest how Sri Lanka can benefit from the obvious need for social support in the context of ‘COVID-19’.

- Sheran Fernando

Relief payments are necessary, but they should be tied to retraining so that those who are unemployed or underemployed can find productive work. Since the world will clearly require better service, training for hospitality and for healthcare these areas could be priorities.

Both these require better soft skills, in particular in English. Surely government can start online English courses, and link welfare payments to the successful participation in these courses?

Examples of govt. support for industrial development in Sri Lanka

A lesser-known fact of how IT industry and IT attitude got a quantum jump in India was that a local politician Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh anticipated the Y2K issue and trained thousands of youth to be able to debug software from the feared Y2K syndrome. Thousands of these trained programmers, though at the lower end of the spectrum, were employed in the USA to reprogramme software for a simple task of changing the date stamp in the programmes.

Better educated among them were able to find further employment in the US but most returned with large savings and larger aspirations. IT became the buzzword in India and Hyderabad and Bangalore became global IT hubs.

Garment exports constituted 44.7 percent of our total exports in 2018, and is a significant contributor to our economy in terms of contribution to GDP and also total employment.

This industry was devised and nurtured by the Premadasa government of the late 80’s to early 90’s. The promotion of this industry defied all ‘laws of comparative advantage’ and was frowned on by many economists at the time.

The industry, that over the years of war was a saving grace for the Sri Lankan economy, was created by political will. It was nurtured and assisted into maturity.