28 October 2023 04:59 am Views - 669
They move from one house to another mainly depending on the relationship with the landlords. Also, there are street dwellers who also do not have a permanent address.
Yet, if a whole community is deprived of their right to own a piece of land and have a permanent address, owing to poverty and law, for the past 200 years, it should be treated as a national tragedy. That is what was signified by a Fundamental Rights case now pending before the Supreme Court.
While various political parties and groups holding various events to mark the 200th year of arrival of people of Indian origin in Sri Lanka, an estate worker has filed this petition in the Supreme Court on March 30 this year, seeking an order directing the authorities to grant registered permanent addresses to the estate community residing in all over the country.
Petitioner Jeewarathnam Sureshkumar a resident of Muwankanda Waththa in Mawathagama filed this petition as a citizen of this country aggrieved by lack of registered residential addresses allocated to their residences.
The Petitioner states that estate workers constituting a significant part of the country’s labor force employed in the tea, rubber, and coconut plantations, which is one of country’s primary economic sources do not receive letters and postal items personally to their houses or their names, as they do not have a permanent address.
The letters addressed to them are delivered in bulk to the Superintendent of estates, who then arranges them to be delivered to the workers through somebody, who is in most cases an unreliable person.
The Petitioner states that the Janatha Estates Development Board (JEDB) managed nearly 277 plantations and about 400, 000 people reside in those plantations, all of whom do not possess a residential address.The petitioner is further seeking a declaration that their fundamental rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution have been violated.
In fact, the question about not having a permanent address is not only a question of receiving letters, which is rare nowadays, with the availability of mobile phones. It rather affects them in occasions such as when applying for jobs outside the estates, registering births, applying for a death certificate, getting married, registering for examinations, opening a bank account, enrolling children in a school, matters pertaining to Police investigations, getting a National Identity Card (NIC), receiving Government allowances such as the Samurdhi and getting Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) as well as Employees’ Trust Fund (ETF) benefits.
The government seems to have positively looked at the matter and the Attorney General on May 27 had informed the Supreme Court that the Secretary to the Ministry of Plantation Industry was currently studying the possibility of providing registered permanent addresses to the estate community.
In fact, nobody can and would ask why the plantation workers – no matter what their contribution to the national economy has been - should have a permanent address. It looks odd for a whole community not having a permanent address.
Except for a relatively small segment of the plantation community others do not have at least an inch of land on earth. This is a community that earned the highest revenue segment of the national economy until mid-eighties when the apparel industry and the West Asian labour market gradually surpassed it.
Nevertheless, plantation industry is still a major foreign exchange earner for the country. Depriving the workforce that toiled for this end of the right of a home of their own for 200 years is serious blow to the collective conscience of the entire populace of the country. it is also a matter of recognition.
At the initial years since 1823, exactly 200 years ago, thousands of workers who were shipped here from India to work, landed in Mannar, and were made to dangerously trek on foot to Matale and then to Kandy from where they were sent to various areas to work in coffee estates. They endured life threatening diseases, clearing jungles and braved wild animals throughout their journey. In some groups, it is said, as many as 40 percent died along the way, and were buried or disposed of.
Until mid-eighties or early nineties (of the last century), they all worked under appalling conditions. Their home was a 10X10 room and a kitchen smaller than it, irrespective of the number of members of the family.
This housing environment created many social and cultural issues. For a young daughter to change her dress father and the brothers had to move out. Newly wedded young couples had to live in the same line room with the parents of the bride or the groom until they are given a new abode- a line room.
There were no sufficient toilet facilities, except for a couple of common toilets which did not have water facilities. Electricity was then not even in their faintest dreams. The kerosene lamp was the only source of light. Rarely in a house was at least a kerosene oven used.
They still represent the least level in all social indicators such as maternal mortality, child mortality and malnutrition. Until recently classes only up to grade 5 were conducted in estate schools and the only mode of transport for them, even for the heart patients was the estate’s lorry that was used to transport tea leaves or rubber products.
After more than 100 years of hard work to earn the major part of the foreign exchange that was needed to develop the country under inhuman working conditions, they were heartlessly deprived of their right to citizenship and franchise by the leaders of the country, Ceylon, as it was then called,on the eve of its Independence, just for supporting the then Opposition, the leftist parties.
However, the situation has somewhat changed now. In eighties authorities constructed what they called “twin cottages”, instead line rooms, but only in very few estates. Then, a programme was launched to distribute 7 perches of land to the estate worker families, but it was also implemented only in some areas while small plots of bare land which were abandoned as wastelands were also given to them by the estate managements.
Power supply was extended to the workers’ houses. Citizenship and franchise issues were resolved in 1988 by the United National Party (UNP), the very party that deprived them of those rights forty years ago.
In the meantime, the community has also produced many high ranking officials including ambassadors, judges and successful businessmen. Yet, 176, 000 families are still living in line rooms, continuing the issue of permanent address, according to the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the largest trade union in the plantation sector.
The demand for Rs 1,000 daily wage is a classic indication to the dire economic condition of the estate worker families. Due to the fact that they do not get sufficient days of work, a person’s monthly income would always be below Rs. 25,000, even if the demand for the Rs 1,000 is met.
The estate community seems to be facing an identity crisis as well. Some of their leaders express reservations over identifying them as people of Indian Origin while at the same time distancing themselves from being identified with Sri Lankan Tamils, who are mainly hailing from Northern and Eastern Provinces.
Hence, since lately they identify themselves as Malaiyaga
(Hill country) Tamils.