In 2019, poverty in Sri Lanka stood at 11 per cent. By the height of the 2022 crisis, it had more than doubled to 25%; some estimates now put it above 30%. Out of that collapse came Aswesuma, the country’s biggest welfare overhaul in a generation. Dr Thisuri Wanniarachchi helped build it. She is a public policy scholar and former Government official who has worked in international development, advising Governments and multilateral institutions on social protection policy and investment operations across South and East Asia, the Middle East (ME), and Southern Africa. She is also an award-winning novelist, and she joined us on Kaleidoscope.

Following are excerpts of the interview:

When it was decided to roll out Aswesuma, how much of it was yours and what came down from Colombo and from the WB?

The design of Aswesuma, of course, was catalysed by the economic crisis, but it goes way back to 2016, when the Government at the time negotiated lending and payment terms with the World Bank (WB) for reforming the entire social protection system. It got altered over many years and the economic crisis really helped move it forward. But, the thing about multilateral lending is that a lot of it involves Government ownership – even the targeting mechanism that they use is totally local. The formula, the multi-differentiation system, is very local.

How much of the response was real policy design versus firefighting against an IMF deadline?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) deadline wasn’t really a big factor here; it was more of a need-on-the-ground-driven response. There was, of course, a lot of firefighting because of the emergency and all the shortages. I think that the IMF accelerated income through to March 2023. The rest of the time we were mostly just firefighting and putting together emergency assistance programmes. A lot of the multilateral banks repurposed money from other projects into emergency finance. 

When I was at the Bank, I helped roll out an emergency cash transfer programme to 3.1 million households; as you might recall, Rs 5,000 went to each one, so a lot of it was emergency response. But, in the process, we also managed to push through some policy reforms, which was great.

Our welfare system has run a lot on patronage. What was hardest about stripping that human discretion out of it?

The hardest part was convincing the bureaucracy to give up the existing process. I’m not talking about the top layer in Colombo, but the divisional-level officials who had taken on Samurdhi as a big part of their professional identity,  especially development officers who had spent their entire careers as Samurdhi officers. Stripping that programme away from them was a big loss and a big adjustment. It famously led to a lot of backlash, including union backlash, and delayed the rollout. The first Aswesuma payment went out in July or August of 2023.

Last year (in 2025), 420,000 families were abruptly reclassified, resulting in almost a million appeals. What does that say about the gap between the policy on paper and the policy on the ground?

There’s a lot of misunderstanding here. When we designed the original programme in 2022, the idea was that after three years, we would reassess it and its poverty impact. There are four tiers: the ultra-poor, the poor, the vulnerable, and the transient. We said that we’d reassess whether to keep the top two tiers on, since those are the groups that can graduate out of poverty and be supported through other programmes instead. 

So, what you saw last year, the removal of roughly 420,000 households from the vulnerable and transient tiers, on top of another 400,000 before that, and the appeals that followed, is actually the programme working exactly as intended. It was up to the Government to decide how to proceed, and they made a calculated policy decision. I see that as progress.

In this area of poverty, you’ve worked in Asia, Pakistan, the Maldives, Africa and the ME. What did we get right here, and what did we get wrong?

What keeps me going is realising how much we get right, especially our healthcare and education systems. It’s easy to critique them and there’s a lot of room for improvement, but, even at the height of a 30-year war, we didn’t see the kind of malnutrition that you find in parts of the world that I’ve worked in. We’ve maintained healthy maternal mortality rates and a healthcare system that’s hard for most countries to achieve and we should be proud of that. Our literacy rate is also high, and while some argue that literacy alone isn’t enough, it matters enormously; it affects how people understand the law, their Government, and the economy. 

Where we get it wrong is in the economic policy: protectionism, tariffs, and an approach, that has restricted consumer choice. Doing business in this environment hasn’t been healthy and it’s had a real negative impact on the economy.

You’ve sat inside Government and inside multilateral institutions. How do you reconcile these two vantage points when they pull you in different directions?

I try not to reconcile them, because there’s an obvious power dynamic. But, they’re also very similar; both are complex, complicated bureaucracies with their own challenges. Where I see the real issue is at the negotiating table: officials on both sides carry a similar workload but are paid very differently. 

I’ve always advocated for Government servants, especially those carrying the heavy load of the economy, to be paid well. We need to incentivise the public sector to stay on top of its game. We hold them accountable for managing millions of dollars of our money, we pay them very poorly, and I find that deeply problematic. We should be investing more in our public sector.

If you could redesign us as a country, what would it look like?

We were firefighting, but now, we’ve come a long way and have a social registry running. I would add a layer of conditional cash transfers tied to nutrition and school attendance. Pakistan did this successfully with the Benazir Nashonuma programme, which targets malnutrition and the Waseela-e-Taleem programme. 

We don’t have to look far; there are success stories in the region that we can draw from. I’d want something similar in areas with high malnutrition and school attendance issues.

 Do you think that Aswesuma insulated us from political influence, or did we just change the form that that influence takes?

I think that it changed the game completely. When I started working on social protection, some of these lists were paper-based and entirely at the discretion of officials. I still have this image from the last day of the Aragalaya: a man who’d been bused in to attack protesters was beaten bloody and was pleading for his life, saying, “I only came here because they told me that they’d take my Samurdhi benefit away if I didn’t.” That’s the kind of country that we had, where people’s benefits were used as leverage for political patronage. 

Now, all of that beneficiary data sit in a secure location with real privacy and data protocols. Beneficiary lists are published when people are selected, and anyone can dispute them. It’s a very different system and I think that we’ve largely taken the patronage out of social protection.

Do you think that Aswesuma is now many steps removed from the politically-driven welfare schemes that Sri Lanka has always had?

I really believe so. Where political influence comes in now isn’t at the granular level of individual beneficiaries, it’s in deciding what kind of programme to have and how many people to finance. That’s how modern, advanced Governments function, and I think that that’s a good thing.

Does the novelist in you still change how you see the human side of this policy, or do the two stay separate?

I hadn’t written as a novelist in about 12 years, and honestly, I didn’t think I still had it in me when I wrote my last book. All I’d done for years was write reports and formal documents. I still look for the story in people. I try to look past the numbers to the people that those numbers represent, and I think that that’s made me more passionate and driven in my work.

The writer is the host, director, and co-producer of the weekly digital programme ‘Kaleidoscope with Savithri Rodrigo’ which can be viewed on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. She has over three decades of experience in print, electronic, and social media

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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication