A legislator has called for support from politicians of both sides of the house to solve the issue of landless non-workers living in commercial plantations, after an incident involving the dismantling of a make-shift dwelling in an estate in Matale.
Plantations officials had ordered the dwelling to be dismantled amid protests and to the sounds of crying children, in a video footage shared over social media, that drew a sympathetic response.
Subsequently Jeevan Thondaman a Minister of Water Supply and Estate Infrastructure Development, Jeevan Thondaman was involved in an altercation with company officials after he visited the estate.
According to Plantations Companies there are 987,000 living in estates based on officially available data. Of that only about 115,000 were workers. The rest were not workers but are allowed to stay since they had been their for generations.
About 65,000 stand alone houses had been built since the plantations were privatized in 1991 for company workers.
Each family was given 7 perches of land and some money to start building a house. The rest of the money came from NGOs and other donors through a Plantations Housing Development Trust.
On average there were about 2.1 workers per family. In addition, 116,000 older dwellings were upgraded, according to plantations companies.
The problem remained over non-workers.
“There are about 200,000 people in the estates who are workers and another 800,000 of their family members who are not given any rights, and not even recognized,” Thondaman said.
“We have spoken to President Ranil Wickremesinghe, Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardnana.
“It was Minister Ramesh Pathirana who started this move. Along with Minister Harin Fernando we will be submitting a cabinet paper very shortly to grant these people 10 perches. That is about 200,000 families.”
Thondaman told parliament that an Assistant Manager at Ratwatte Estate at Elkaduwa Plantations had been removed.
The Planters Association representing estate managers protested what it called was the abuse of officials who were trying to stop an illegal encroachment of state land on lease.
Minister Thondaman “used abusive language and threatened the senior management of Ratwatte Estate, belonging to Elkaduwa Plantations. The Planters’ Association of Ceylon vehemently condemns this verbal attack and calls for an impartial investigation. ”
“After reporting the matter to the police, the management exercised their authority to protect the state property as custodians of the land, in accordance with the law.
“The land of Ratwatte Estate belongs to the government with Elkaduwa Plantations having been awarded the management contract for it.”
“If the assistant manager had an issue of the non-worker who encroached or illegally built a structure, there are legal ways in which it can be addressed,” Thondaman told parliament, justifying his intervention.
However he said no legal action can be taken against company officials.
“Mr Velukumar, I explained at the start that it was an illegal encroachment,” Thondaman responded to an opposition legislator.
“You are talking on humanitarian grounds. I am talking about legality. There is a difference. That difference being when someone has illegally encroached on that land they have no say over that land.
“The assistant manager has been removed immediately. And the second thing I believe the minister has also agreed is that 11 people who were there who were not workers will be given land and they will be given houses.
“You are saying take legal action on an illegal issue. That is not possible. You are trying to make politics out of this issue. The source of this issue is that people do not have rights over land.”
He called on parliamentarians to get together to solve the problem.
“Then we have this issue, a non-worker, a human being was subject to such inhuman treatment. I am sure all of you have seen the video. I do not want to separate and create divisions among ourselves. We are here in black attire and protesting, I understand all of that.
“I think we should understand that if all of us were to come together, we can get a solution collectively. The problem is we are not looking at this in a positive manner. We are looking at how we can use this community as a vote bank.”
Thondaman said the estate Tamil community had been mistreated by successive Sri Lanka governments and they were denied citizenship for over 30 years.
Sri Lanka’s government had given state land (or so-called Crown land dating from the British period) in various irrigation schemes, where freehold ownership, a concept that originally emerged in Britain (see also fee simple), is also not complete.
In most free countries people who are born in the country are considered citizens, especially when their parents were also born in the country. Estate workers migrated to Sri Lanka during British rule from India.
However, Sri Lanka enacted a nationalist citizenship law soon after getting independence from British rule and blocked naturalization, according to critics.
During the time of ancient kings also the migrations took place for various professions, including for soldiery, but there was no European style nationalist citizenship law to block naturalization, according to students of history.
Along with developments in Europe, the British had already started to tighten migration, especially of persons outside the British possessions, several decades before independence.
Meanwhile there is a migration of young people away from plantations into cities, who are looking for jobs in retail and in the service sector while some are migrating abroad. In areas with better quality education, young people find it easier to get jobs.
Sri Lanka was a net importer of labour before a central bank was built in 1950, allowing ‘macro-economists’ to create forex shortages and balance of payments deficits in the Harvard-Cambridge inflationist tradition and permanently depreciate the rupee after US inflationists busted the Bretton Woods system.
British rulers enacted several laws to make it more difficult to migrate out of the island including Foreign Recruiting Ordinance of 1874.
Many other Sri Lankans are also leaving the country after inflationist ‘macro-economists’ destroyed real wages by busting the rupee, in their latest escapade involving the 2020-2021 macro-economic policy to target an output gap.
Plantations workers themselves had seen their wages fall after output gap targeting.
#Modern_Slavery act of Estate Manager at #Lka government owned Matale district Elkaduwa Plantations, Ratwatta Estate lower division. Short-while ago, I called Plantation minister #RameshPathirana, yelled at him; " Sack the Fellow, We are at the end of our patience". #ManoGanesan… pic.twitter.com/mGOrYDkNqK
— Mano Ganesan (@ManoGanesan) August 19, 2023