Sri Lanka: Malayagam Tamils seek rights recognition

The suggestion is that many from this community should be provided facilities for better schooling and if necessary educational grants for study abroad and sought volunteer support from abroad to teach them vocational skills.

by our London Correspondent-Mar 6, 2017

Mar 6, 2017

(March 6, 2017, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) While many Tamils from Europe were concerned at ongoings at UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva, others hoping to promote another agenda met under the banner, “Solidarity for Malayaga Tamils” held at Sudbury Methodist Church Hall Harrow Road, Wembley, London HA0 2LP on 4 March 2017.It also commemorated the 200th anniversary of migrant workers imported by the British from South India to Ceylon.

The cry was every community has fought for survival and the Plantation migrant workers of Sri Lanka are no exception. A large presence of left of centre parties were among those who participated, presided over by Mr.V.Sivalingam a well known activist.

Speakers highlighted the plight of the minority migrant workers living conditions on tea estates today which they said had not improved over years. They live in labour lines with families cramped up, using common toilets and shared taps. Educational facilities made available to this community have been deplorable. Many estates have dispensaries in estates, but no doctors. The system is to keep generations of the migrant workers at poverty wages and bound to the estates.

One speaker complained that many of these Estate Tamils have no vision of themselves or their future. Women are forbidden to wear bangles on their hands, disallowed to plant banana shoots on allotments, forbidden to keep goat farming to supplement their livelihood. They have been kept as “koolies” for generations, with “kankanies” keeping watch over their activities with a “Durai”as overlord.

The plantation labour continues to be formed of a very deprived class without means of social advancement, kept isolated in line rooms and alienated from society. A few who have managed to obtain education and migrated overseas were among those who said that “something must be done now to provide for their betterment”.

The suggestion is that many from this community should be provided facilities for better schooling and if necessary educational grants for study abroad and sought volunteer support from abroad to teach them vocational skills.

The meeting was held under the photo of Late Fr.Guy de Fontgallen, a missionary who spent his life in the estates for their betterment and whose demise was greatly missed.

Indian Tamils are the descendants of workers sent from South India to Ceylon in the 19th and 20th centuries to work in British plantations originally coffee, tea and rubber. Thick jungle was cleared by this migrant labour working in conditions of poor health and disease and low wages.

In 1964 a large percentage was “stateless” and repatriated to India. By 1990’s many were given Sri Lanka citizenship. In 2003 Parliament unanimously decided to grant citizenship to Up Country Tamils. There are over 200,000 of these migrant workers still performing service in Tea estates today.