Abstract:
It is essential that public service provision carried out through government
administrative machinery be performed on the basis of equality and non-discrimination.
However, the case is different in the plantation community in Sri Lanka, where people
have been encountering issues and problems in exercising equal right to public service.
Against this backdrop, the study explores the current status of access to public service
in the plantation community from a human rights perspective in general, and a social
citizenship rights perspective in particular. The study is based on secondary data and
utilized content analysis to analyse different published and unpublished material. The
study found that there is a lack of trust between officials and the community in selected
locations due to prolonged ethnic strife, statelessness, exclusions from the national
development process and Sinhalization of the national bureaucracy. Further, the
national languages policy has not been implemented properly in the above institutions
and most public servants working in them are incapable of functioning in the Tamil
language. Human Rights treaties ratified by the government of Sri Lanka and the Sri
Lankan Constitution clearly stipulate the equal right to public service, but such rights
are not exercised by the plantation people.
