Reading the article titled “Child labour in the tea plantations in Sri Lanka” in your issue of September 30 by President’s Counsel Maureen Seneviratne, my thoughts go back to my childhood days, when we lived in the hill country surrounded by tea estates.
Since my eldest brother was a planter during the time when tea estates were owned and managed by Europeans, we spent our holidays on estates where he worked. The impression I got of the life of Indian estate labour, as a school boy, in my later years, I expressed in the following poem about ten years ago and appeared in several news papers, which gives the true picture of our Indian Estate labour, which prevailed then
It will be interesting to know the circumstances under which these workers were brought to Sri Lanka, then called and known as Ceylon, by quoting an address to the second annual Agricultural Conference on March,11, 1927 by Governor Sir Hugh Clifford where he quotes Emerson Tennent: “The temptation of wages and no prospects of advantages has hitherto availed to overcome the repugnance of the Sinhalese and Kandyans to engage in any work on estates except the first process of felling trees” and continues “Disliking wage labour on its own account but detesting even the cold and the wet amid which work had to be carried out up yonder on the mountain heights and slopes, which Europeans had converted from forests into tea gardens.
"Any action taken by governments to ameliorate the living conditions of the present estate Tamil labour in providing decent living quarters, good schools for their children and health facilities is a fitting tribute to their ancestors"
That Ceylon estate supply of perennial supply of voluntary immigrant labour is one of the happy accidents, which have contributed to the welfare of this fortunate isle; but if the soil in the district of Madras Presidency from which supply was drawn were fertile as is that of the most thickly populated parts of Ceylon, the estate owners might whistle in vain for Tamil labourers to flock to their assistance and our principal agricultural industries would quickly languish on the place of those estate workers on the upland tea estates, at least could never be taken by the people of this land”
It will be seen and understood, that circumstances under which Indian Tamil labour had to be engaged, which was solely due to our laziness and inherent easy living. Any action taken by governments to ameliorate the living conditions of the present estate Tamil labour in providing decent living quarters, good schools for their children and health facilities is a fitting tribute to their ancestors, who had undergone untold hardships for the economic and social well being of this country and its people.
