About the report
Published in February 2021, the report was prepared jointly by the International Disability Alliance and CIP under the UNPRPD COVID-19 joint response framework, with support from ILO, UNICEF, and UK Aid. It draws on webinars and submissions from more than 50 Organizations of Persons with Disabilities across the region.
Eight countries, one pandemic, and almost no coordinated response for the people hit hardest by it. This report on disability social protection and COVID-19 in South Asia, co-authored by Meenakshi Balasubramanian of the Center for Inclusive Policy (CIP) for the International Disability Alliance, reviews how Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka adapted their social protection systems for persons with disabilities during COVID-19.
Did Any Country Introduce a Disability-Specific COVID Response?
Only partially, India introduced a one-off top-up cash transfer to existing disability pension recipients, worth about $14 total, spread across three months. Sri Lanka expanded its existing disability allowance waitlist. Every other country in the region either extended general relief measures to persons with disabilities without adapting them, or made no specific provision at all.
Why Didn't General Relief Measures Work for People with Disabilities?
Because access barriers that predate the pandemic didn’t go away during it. Disability ID cards and certificates, required to access nearly every benefit in the region, remained hard to obtain, particularly for people in rural areas, people with newer or less-recognised conditions, and Dalit and indigenous communities with disabilities. In Nepal, many Dalits with disabilities lacked even a basic citizenship card, leaving them outside every relief measure entirely.
How Much Does the Region Actually Spend on This?
Very little. South Asia already has one of the lowest levels of public social protection spending in the world, at 2.7% of regional GDP. India, the region’s largest economy, allocates just 0.03% of GDP specifically to disability programs. For comparison, UNICEF estimated that a universal disability allowance across South Asian countries would cost between 0.2% and 0.3% of GDP, a fraction of what many higher-income countries already spend.
Who Got Left Out Entirely?
Women with disabilities, people in institutional care, and people needing high levels of support saw almost no targeted attention anywhere in the region. In India, a survey found that none of the women with disabilities interviewed had received the government’s announced top-up payment. People living in residential institutions, already at heightened COVID-19 risk, weren’t factored into national guidelines in most countries, and no government paired its pandemic response with deinstitutionalisation efforts.
What Does the Report Recommend?
Its core recommendations center on treating disability inclusion as a design principle, not an afterthought. It’s key to build social protection around a universal approach that compensates for disability-related costs, ensures OPDs participate directly in program design, fix accessibility of information and certification processes, and invest in disaggregated data using tools like the Washington Group Questions so future responses aren’t built on guesswork.
