Sri Lanka has seen its share of disasters, both natural and man-made, impact the island time and again. One question left on the lips of Sri Lankans citizens post-disaster is ‘Why were we not ready for that?’ The approach of Sri Lanka’s governance to disasters is characteristic of how it responds to many other issues – reactionary.
The State will scramble to cobble together some response and throw State sector first responders into the fray, with the political leadership stepping in much later at a convenient photo-opportune moment to convey ‘what went wrong’ and how much compensation will be paid to the victims. This version of pitiful State responsibility plays over and over again with each episode, with ‘committees’ – the Sri Lankan bureaucratic equivalent of ‘not serious enough to have a policy review, but important enough to buy time till the next crisis’ – appointed to forget the matter.
The policy focus given to disaster preparedness, prevention, resilience-building, and mitigation is made crystal clear with the recent revelation that the National Council for Disaster Management, the island’s apex body on disaster management, was convened last week after a hiatus of seven years. According to the President’s Office, the council had met under the patronage of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, with its last meeting in April 2018.
The council was established after the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, which caused the highest casualties in a natural disaster in the recorded history of Sri Lanka. The council is responsible for overseeing the duties assigned to all institutions involved in disaster management, minimising disaster risks across the country, and making necessary policy decisions to guide those efforts. It also coordinates and facilitates disaster risk mitigation activities at national and provincial levels through the Disaster Management Centre.
According to a press release by the President's office, the Disaster Management Plan and the National Emergency Operations Plan were presented and approved by the council. The incumbent Government must be given due credit for reviving this stalled national body, and let us hope it will continue to engage with the council and produce policies and mechanisms to keep Sri Lanka safe and prepared for what the future holds.
“The discussion focused on new trends, future plans, and current measures for disaster risk reduction in Sri Lanka. The council emphasised the importance of establishing a unified and centrally coordinated mechanism to enhance the efficiency of disaster management. In light of prevailing climate-related challenges, the committee underscored the need to enhance disaster management mechanisms and concluded that the existing legislation must be amended to reflect contemporary needs and emerging risks,” the press release said, adding that the President had instructed relevant officials to revise current financial limitations associated with disaster management and relief, as well as to allocate the required financial resources to restart halted projects. He had also instructed officials to update the Disaster Management Act in alignment with current conditions and challenges.
With climate change increasingly impacting small littoral states like Sri Lanka, it is important that we as a nation get our act together on being prepared, resilient, and proactive about natural disasters, and to be well-geared to act when man-made disasters strike. Being an island nation around which a bulk of the worlds’ trade flows, Sri Lanka also ought to have a robust mechanism in place to deal with different crises in the maritime domain.
Two incidents, namely the MT New Diamond, a very large crude oil carrier which caught fire and drifted off the eastern coast of Sri Lanka in September 2020, followed by the Singaporean-registered freighter MV X-Press Pearl which caught fire in May 2021, sinking off the Colombo Port’s anchorage and causing what is now termed as Sri Lanka’s largest marine pollution disaster, should have been a wake-up call for local authorities and for the populace to wake up from its slumber and recognise the elephant in the room: Sri Lanka is not ready to deal with maritime crises and our disaster response mechanisms and capacities for resilience are weak.
With ongoing controversies over how the MV X-Press Pearl disaster was handled, it is evident that Sri Lanka needs to overhaul its existing maritime incident/pollution control mechanisms as well. The legislative subject matter expertise and enforcement capacity shortcomings, compounded by possible criminal negligence and alleged corruption, linked to how Sri Lanka responded to the X-Press Pearl disaster, is indicative of the gaps that are there and the need for a policy focus to put it right. As Sri Lanka moves through a transformative period following the political turmoil and the economic crisis which began in 2020-2023, learning from past mistakes and enacting various reforms to avoid repeating them should be a priority.