Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury
Research and Programme Associate, CRG was University was awarded with the short-term writing fellowships under the Resource Centre segment of Forced Migration programme 2010. She visited Sri lanka between 27 February and 6 March 2011. for the sake of her research on States and Stateless in South Asia: The Chakmas of Arunachal Pradesh, India and Plantation workers of Sri Lanka.

Her Visiting Report (27.02.11-06.03.2011)

As she completed her field trip to Arunachal Pradesh she intended to visit Sri Lanka for the sake of her study. Most of the stateless people in Sri Lanka are descendants of people who had been brought from India by British colonisers between 1820 and 1840 to work on coffee and tea plantations in Sri Lanka. Known as “up-country Tamils” or “hill Tamils”, the majority still lives on tea estates in southern and central Sri Lanka. A minority was displaced in the north and east by inter-ethnic fighting in 1983. Over the years, several Indo-Sri Lankan agreements have granted some of these people either Indian or Sri Lankan citizenship, but as of October 2003, there were still an estimated 300,000 stateless people of Indian origin in Sri Lanka. The 2003 Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin Act gave citizenship to persons of Indian origin residing in Sri Lanka since October 1964 and their descendants to solve the problem of statelessness in Sri Lanka. With these facts under consideration Anasua in her study intends to assess the present situation of plantation labourers in Sri Lanka. In order to review the existing legislative and administrative measures with regard to the stateless people she examines the role of Sri Lankan government to provide citizenship to the plantation labourers. Her study also intends to study how the people of older generation, who are still stateless, perceive their statelessness.

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Surendra Kumar
Lecturer, Political Science, Bangalore University was awarded with the short-term writing fellowships under the Resource Centre segment of Forced Migration programme 2010.

His Visiting Report from Sri Lanka (20.12.10-28.12.2010)

In his study on Conflict and Internal Displacement in Sri Lanka: Concerns and Obstacles to Durable has attempted to explain the fact that the issue of IDPs being given the top priority in the international arena, it still remains a daunting humanitarian challenge and a long way before the problem is fully addressed.

Decades of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka is said to have left around 800,000 Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs). Some estimates put the figure at more than one million people. On an average one in every 18 Sri Lankan is displaced, and in the Northern Province it is one in every three persons. Apparently, the majority of displaced people are mainly from the northern and eastern provinces. S. Y. Surendra Kumar’s article “Conflict and Internal Displacement In Sri Lanka: Concerns and Obstacles to Durable Solutions” delves into this issue, finding the causes of displacement (from military campaigns to developmental projects, from majoritarianism to uneven political development); it also brings out the details of an ongoing process of finding a solution for and rehabilitating the displaced people.