Sri Lanka’s plantation workers live on the fringes of society. But politicians still want their votes

SPRING VALLEY, Sri Lanka — Whoever Sri Lanka’s next president is, Muthuthevarkittan Manohari doesn’t expect much to change in her daily struggle to feed her four children and elderly mother, with whom she lives in a dilapidated room on a tea plantation.

Both candidates in Saturday’s presidential election are promising to give land to the country’s hundreds of thousands of plantation workers, but Manohari says he’s heard it all before. Sri Lanka’s plantation workers are a long-marginalized group that often lives in dire poverty, but they can swing elections by voting en bloc.

Mahohari and his family are descended from Indian indentured labourers, recruited by the British during colonial rule to work on coffee, then tea and rubber plantations. These crops are still Sri Lanka’s main sources of foreign exchange.

For 200 years, this community lived on the margins of Sri Lankan society. Shortly after the country’s independence in 1948, the new government stripped them of their citizenship and voting rights. About 400,000 people were deported to India under an agreement with Delhi, separating many families.

The community fought for its rights, winning victories in stages until it achieved full recognition as citizens in 2003.

Today, approximately 1.5 million descendants of plantation workers live in Sri Lanka, including about 3.5% of the electorate, and some 470,000 people still live on the plantations. The plantation community has the highest rates of poverty, malnutrition, anaemia among women and alcoholism in the country, as well as some of the lowest levels of education.

This is a significant electoral bloc, made up of trade unions that also serve as political parties allied to the country’s main parties.

Although they speak Tamil, they are treated as a separate group from the island’s indigenous Tamils, who live mainly in the north and east. Yet they suffered during the 26-year civil war between government forces and the Tamil Tiger separatists. Plantation workers and their descendants faced mob violence, arrests and imprisonment because of their ethnicity.

Most plantation workers live in crowded dwellings, called “row houses,” owned by plantation companies. Tomoya Obokata, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, said after a 2022 visit that five to 10 people often share a single room measuring 3.05 meters by 3.60 meters, often without windows, adequate kitchen facilities, running water, or electricity. Multiple families frequently share a single basic latrine.

There are no proper medical facilities on the plantations and the sick are treated by so-called plantation medical assistants who do not have medical degrees.

“These substandard living conditions, combined with harsh working conditions, are clear indicators of forced labour and may also amount to serfdom in some cases,” Obokata wrote in a report to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The government has made some efforts to improve working conditions for plantation workers, but years of fiscal crisis and resistance from powerful plantation companies have slowed progress. Access to education has improved, and a small cadre of plantation worker entrepreneurs, professionals, and academics has emerged.

This year, the government negotiated an increase in the minimum daily wage for a plantation worker to 1,350 rupees ($4.50) a day, plus an extra dollar if a worker harvests more than 22 kilograms a day. Workers say that target is nearly impossible to achieve, partly because tea bushes are often neglected and grow sparsely.

The government has built better homes for some families and the Indian government is helping to build more, said Periyasamy Muthulingam, executive director of the Sri Lanka Institute of Social Development, which works on plantation workers’ rights.

But many promises have not been fulfilled. “All political parties promised to build better houses during elections, but they do not implement them once in power,” Muthulingam said.

Muthulingam says more than 90 percent of the plantation community’s residents are landless because they have been excluded from government land distribution programs.

In the election, incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe, an independent candidate, promised to give the houses and the land on which they stand to the people who live there and help them develop into villages. The main opposition candidate, Sajith Premadasa, promised to dismantle the plantations and distribute the land to workers in the form of smallholdings.

Both proposals will face resistance from plantation companies.

Manohari says she doesn’t have much hope. She is more concerned about what will happen to her 16-year-old son, who is forced to drop out of school due to lack of funds.

“The union leaders come every time promising us houses and land, and I would like to have them,” she said. “But they never come true as promised.”

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Francis reported from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

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