Payment of gratuity entitlements owed to plantation workers for more than 20 years begins tomorrow, with Rs. 4.5 billion to be distributed to the plantation community, NewsFirst reported.
The Ministry of Plantation and Community Infrastructure said the inaugural ceremony will be held at the Kandy District Secretariat.
Dr. Sisira Ranathunga, Chairman of the Sri Lanka State Plantations Corporation — an institution affiliated to the ministry — gave the Rs. 4.5 billion figure.
A 20-year arrears backlog
Gratuity is a statutory terminal benefit, payable to an employee on the end of their service. An arrears period of more than two decades means workers who left plantation employment in the early 2000s, and in many cases their surviving dependants, have been waiting on entitlements that had already accrued when they stopped work.
Neither the ministry nor the corporation has said publicly why the payments went unmade for so long, how many workers are covered, how individual entitlements were calculated, or over what period the full Rs. 4.5 billion will be disbursed. NewsFirst’s report gives the total and the starting date but no breakdown.
Context
The payment lands in the middle of a run of government commitments to the plantation workforce, most of them concerning land and residence rather than cash. In August President Anura Kumara Dissanayake set out estate-community rights under a Central Highlands authority, and a scheme to lease plantation land to returnee migrant workers was announced the same month.
Conditions in the sector have also drawn external scrutiny. Amnesty International documented forced-labour indicators on tea estates affecting the Malaiyaha Tamil community in May, and estate labour featured in the forced-labour programme raised alongside the US tariff decision this month. Unpaid statutory benefits stretching back 20 years sit directly against that record.
Sourcing note
Ada Derana has also reported the payments, with a fuller breakdown across the state plantation entities. Its domain returned a CloudFront 403 on every request throughout this cycle, so that account could not be read or verified, and its figures are not reproduced here. Neither the Daily Mirror nor Hiru News had filed on the story at the time of writing.
