: About 250 Indian Tamil families from Sri Lanka, who were resettled in Vetapalem, near Chirala in the Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh in the early 1980s, now face an uncertain future.
The Tamil families, whose forefathers had migrated to the island nation to work in the coffee, tea and rubber plantations during the British regime of the 19th and 20th centuries, reluctantly came back to India, unable to get Sri Lankan citizenship after their disenfranchisement by the United National Party (UNP) government in 1949.
Everything was going well for these Tamil families, who were repatriated under the Sirima-Shastri Pact of 1964 and Indira-Sirimavo supplementary agreement of 1974, till the Chirala Spinning Mills downed its shutters in the year 2000, after declaring lockouts thrice earlier. Now they fear the future that awaits their kith and kin.
A community adrift
With no permanent job on their hand for over 16 years, their future appears bleak, with no scope for returning either to Sri Lanka or to Tamil Nadu, having lost touch with their distant relatives and friends over the decades. They cling to the housing sites allotted to them and keep pressing the authorities here for livelihood support to eke out a decent living.
While some of them do the work they know — spinning yarn on a piece rate basis —others work as painters, construction workers and autorickshaw drivers, said a group of Tamils in the Ceylon Colony here, in a conversation with The Hindu . They also have no facility to learn their mother tongue in the schools here.
‘No longer wanted’
“Our forefathers were taken by the English people to the island nation to clear the forests and promote plantation crops in a big way in the Central Province. Once the plantation industry became well-established, we are no longer wanted there,” laments 60-year-old M. Sivanadiyan, who was living in Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka before being repatriated to Chirala, where he worked for 18 years in the spinning mill before its closure.
“Initially, we were provided family maintenance allowance for two years after the repatriation in 1980, and we were promised house and job for each family. But after the closure of the spinning mill, the authorities have provided no alternative job to us or our sons and daughters,” laments another Sri Lankan repatriate M. Saktivelu, whose ancestors migrated from Tamil Nadu to Kandy in Sri Lanka, to work in the plantations there.
‘Pillar to post’
“We have been running from pillar to post to get at least an acre of cultivable land each to lead a dignified life for the last 16 years but without any positive results,” adds another repatriated worker Selvaraj, who lived in Colombo before coming back to India.
“We have lost all patience going round the revenue offices in Vetapalem and Ongole for a decade and a half,” says A.S. John Benedy, sharing the despairing hope of his fellow Tamils that the authorities would grant them some farmland apiece, one day or the other.
