Slim pickings for plantations' forgotten tea labourers

High above the rich green tea fields of Sri Lanka's hill country stands a billboard welcoming you to Nuwara Eliya, a colonial relic of a town with a bustling modern centre that sits at odds with the British-inspired rose gardens of the local park or the manicured fairways of the golf club. Under a blue sky, the hoarding features a brightly dressed young woman smiling as she eases the young leaves from the tea bushes with a skill passed down from generation to generation among the region's ethnic-Tamil plantation workers. After a long, sweaty ride up from the provincial capital, Kandy, the imagery is almost as refreshing as a sip from a cup of finest oolong. But the billboard's soothing message is far removed from the grimmer reality of 26-year-old Sellamuthu Sivakumar's modest home, a patch of grinding village poverty amid the excess of a billion-dollar industry. Its two spartan rooms, rudimentary electrical wiring and open drains speak of a life of toil with little reward. Some of his neighbours in the 'line house' - a pitiful terrace, devoid of comfort, constructed by the owners of the Upper Radelle tea estate for their 150 Tamil workers and dependant families - have even less to cheer about. At least Sellamuthu's handful of plastic chairs provides some protection from the cold, mud floors. In the hills where the fortunes of colonial tea barons took root and which have helped fuel the Sri Lankan economy since independence, the hardships that dictated life in rural India for Sellamuthu's ancestors are still evident after two centuries of toil in their newly chosen land. Compared with Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese, the estate Tamils die, on average, 10 years earlier, aged 63. They earn less than half the national average wage, about 120 rupees a day (just over US$1). Just over half can read and write compared with a literacy rate of 95 per cent among the Sinhalese. Their children rarely study beyond the primary-school education provided by plantation owners. Health care is minimal and pregnant mothers are rushed to hospital along winding dirt tracks in the backs of lorries donated by their bosses. Despite the fact that the estate Tamils now constitute about eight per cent of Sri Lanka's population, or 1.5 million people, their voice is rarely heard in the media and they are grossly under-represented in parliament. But besides their pressing hand-to-mouth needs, there is something less prosaic missing from the lives of more than 340,000 of the estate Tamils: a nationality. Tea was introduced in what was then British-run Ceylon in the 1860s after coffee crops were wiped out by a devastating fungus. The tea industry quickly came to dominate the country's economy and made the fortunes of men like Thomas Lipton, a grocer's boy from Glasgow. But the industry also gathered tens of thousands of Hindu labourers from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, transplanted and then, with the advent of independence in 1948, abandoned them in the middle of the new, overwhelmingly Buddhist nation where they were largely forgotten. The headline-grabbing 20 years of civil war with the separatist Tamil Tigers concealed their fate. British tea barons sold estates to local owners from the 1950s onwards, and a programme of gradual nationalisation ended with the large-scale transfer of the estates to government control in the mid-1970s. Most are now run by private companies, although the state retains ownership of land. But it took 16 years of self-rule for the issue of the tea workers' nationality to come to the authorities' attention. In 1964, a pact with New Delhi meant 600,000 people were given the right to return to India and an offer of citizenship for a further 300,000. The rest, about 75,000, were left in stateless limbo. Of those slated to return to India, 94,000 failed to take up the offer, and together with the forgotten 75,000, they stayed on. Over the next four decades the number of stateless workers doubled. Now, this historical wrong is about to be put right. In November, Parliament agreed to allow those Tamils without a nationality to apply for the right to call themselves Sri Lankans. More than 100,000 have since registered in a programme organised by the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees, and a party representing the community, the Ceylon Workers' Congress (CWC). V. Radhakrishnan, a CWC leader and provincial minister, is one of the few to have emerged from the plantations to acquire modern luxuries. With his mobile phone, gold jewellery and wide girth, he stands out in a community of basic necessity and gaunt expressions. 'The Tamils of Indian origin now make up eight per cent of the population, but we are not getting the jobs, or the opportunities to go to school and university. This community is discriminated against in many ways,' he said. Visiting the 'line houses', he talked of the need to unify and take the fight to the centre of the political agenda. Mr Radhakrishnan said the Tamils needed to get an education and move off the plantations (95 per cent still work the tea fields). But just as hundreds of thousands of tea-estate Tamils are preparing to become full citizens, the country they are joining is being transformed. 'In the past the plantations have been excluded from the welfare state,' explained Ketheswaran Loganathan of Colombo's Centre for Policy Alternatives. 'But now that welfare state is being dismantled. The government is following International Monetary Fund prescriptions and is cutting social expenditure and withdrawing from the provision of basic services like health and education,' he says. 'That represents a deep irony for the [estate] Tamils.'