On the Fringe: Estate Tamils on Sri Lanka’s Tea Plantations

After fighting off the leeches that plagued us while we interviewed two Department of Forestry officials in the Knuckles Range, we ventured a mere 200 meters to a village on what was already the buffer zone of the protected forest. Through translations from English to Hindi to Tamil or Sinhala back to Hindi and then English again, we interviewed the first villager in the village: an old woman who stood behind her half door while the rest of the neighborhood began to peek from their doors and wander outside, curious about the five strangers crowding around one of their neighbors. This is where we learned the village is government-owned and that its inhabitants are employees of the nearby state-owned tea plantation. This woman's father and grandfather had lived in the same house, dating back to when her grandfather came from India. Her story is apparently a familiar one among Tamil tea cultivators in the Sinhalese-majority country--in reality it is the dominant story.

It began in the 19th century, when the British brought Tamils over from Southern India to work on then-Ceylon's coffee and tea plantations. This form of bonded labor set the stage for the economic, ethnic, linguistic, geographic, and political marginalization of Tamils of South Indian Origin. The great majority of Tamils brought to Sri Lanka were of the lowest castes in India, further promoting and reinforcing the British hierarchy of race and perspective on the worth of manual workers. "Indian Tamils" or "Estate Tamils," as classified by Sri Lankan government, number almost 900,000 and are considered distinct from Sri Lankan Tamils. Back in the day, plantation companies held the responsibility of providing for the welfare of its workers. When the estates were nationalized in the 1970s, the government took over this duty and sought to improve the housing, sanitation, and health situations of this minority population. Not much has changed since that time given the deep history of deprivation and the isolation of these estates.

Although citizenship was finally granted to all stateless Persons of Indian Origin in 2003, most tea pickers in Sri Lanka still live without housing and land rights or access to basic services. Today’s upcountry Tamils, who make up around five per cent of the country’s population, live in the same two-room dwellings that the British had built for their forebears.

In 2012, UNDP Sri Lanka classified individuals working in the tea sector among the poorest in the country, despite the fact that Sri Lanka is the world's third largest producer of tea by weight (second largest by value at $1.5 billion) and that a good portion of its GDP depends upon its production. Not only have estate workers been denied benefits from the successes of Ceylon tea, but the majority of them also still do not own land. They inhabit the line rooms passed down from their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, property of the Sri Lankan government (add picture here). They sometimes do not have running water or electricity, and some children walk several kilometers per day to attend school.

One villager told us that the government has given them a small plot of land between the tea plantations and some seeds, with which they can collectively cultivate or plant trees. Some villagers sneak into the protected forest to gather trees for firewood; others go only when they learn from the plantations that felling is available for taking. It is clear from our visit that the individuals living on the tea plantation at the fringes of the Knuckles Range do not profit from the success of the tea industry. Additionally, their limited knowledge of the region from which they are banned—the protected forest area—demonstrates a marginalization of this community from its surroundings. Perhaps they could better contribute to conservation efforts if they were integrated into the government’s social development efforts and the Wildlife and Forest Departments’ campaigns that aim to improve forest protection.