The Tamil Progressive Alliance has asked the government to put its plantation leasing programme on hold until the housing and livelihood land commitments made to the Malaiyaha Tamil community in the 2023 Hatton Declaration are honoured.

The demand was made ahead of Thursday’s 2027 Budget by Barath Arullsamy, Democratic People’s Front Vice President for International Affairs and Communications and a TPA Politburo member, and reported by the Daily Mirror on Monday evening. He said the community’s land rights were “hanging between the Hatton promise and the Cabinet’s leasing decision”.

“We are asking for what you promised. The Hatton Declaration pledged land rights, dignified housing and the use of uncultivated plantation lands for our youth’s livelihoods. Those assurances helped you win substantial support in the plantation region. Now honour them.”

The two documents in tension

The declaration. The TPA says the Hatton Declaration, launched under Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s leadership in October 2023, committed to addressing land ownership and housing problems and to using uncultivated and abandoned plantation land to improve the livelihoods of unemployed Malaiyaha youth.

This desk verified the launch independently. The Daily FT reported it as an eight-fold policy framework, launched at the DKW Cultural Centre in Hatton and presided over by Dissanayake, then the NPP’s leader, to mark the 200th anniversary of the community’s arrival in Sri Lanka from India. That report is from October 2023 and so falls outside this desk’s seven-day sourcing window; it is linked here as background but is not listed as a source. It does not enumerate the eight points, so the specific land and housing clauses described above remain the TPA’s characterisation of the document rather than a verified quotation from it.

The launch speech is worth recalling for its framing. Dissanayake told the crowd that the community’s votes had long been misused, saying: “There are no votes in the Estates. What exists are vote banks with the keys firmly in the grips of those such as Thondaman and Thigambaram.” The Daily Mirror ran Monday’s statement under the headline “Votes from workers, land for investors” — an inversion of that argument, now aimed at him.

The leasing decision. Arullsamy set the declaration against the Cabinet’s 26 October approval to lease 15 properties belonging to the Janatha Estates Development Board, the Sri Lanka State Plantations Corporation and Elkaduwa Plantations to investors. This desk reported that decision when Cabinet Co-Spokesman Nalinda Jayatissa announced it at the post-Cabinet briefing on 27 October. The TPA’s reference supplies the approval date, which the announcement itself did not give.

Arullsamy said government representatives describe the leasing programme as national policy.

“Then explain how that policy honours your own declaration. Secure housing land with legal deeds and livelihood land for our youth before signing commercial agreements.”

He said the TPA welcomed private investment and economic development, but insisted both must follow rather than precede the securing of the community’s promised land rights.

The implementation gap the TPA cites

Arullsamy offered three examples. More than 1,000 families affected by Cyclone Ditwah remain in disaster-prone areas without permanent resettlement more than ten months on. The Indian-assisted 10,000-house programme and associated infrastructure projects continue to face delays — this desk has previously reported on that programme’s third phase and its Badulla sites. And citing a World Bank assessment from October, he said only about 8% of the Rs 500 billion national reconstruction allocation had been spent by mid-2026.

“Budget allocations and media spectacles cannot shelter a family from a landslide. People need land, completed homes and livelihoods.”

These figures are the TPA’s. This desk has not independently verified the resettlement count or traced the World Bank assessment referred to.

The parliamentary context

Arullsamy recalled that the TPA, under leader Mano Ganesan MP, supported the previous Budget’s Second Reading in good faith. He said Ganesan wrote to President Dissanayake last week and tabled a ten-point letter in Parliament seeking gazetted wage protections, land rights, equitable development, and the repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act without similarly restrictive replacements.

“The Government can find a Cabinet route for investors and draft new powers under proposals such as the PSTA, yet a plantation worker’s land deed apparently requires a miracle.”

The PSTA — the Protection of the State from Terrorism Bill — is the subject of a public consultation process the government announced this month.

The opposite case, two days earlier

The same Budget is being asked for the reverse by the industry. On 7 November the Regional Plantation Companies argued that their leases should be extended, not paused, saying the 19 years left on a 53-year lease cannot finance a tea bush that takes more than 20 years to repay planting costs and asking for the 46 years cut in 1992 to be restored. Those are different leases — privatised estates rather than the state-held JEDB, SLSPC and Elkaduwa lots — but both asks land on the same Budget, and they point in opposite directions on who should get security of tenure first.

Not reported

No government response is recorded. The filing does not say whether any of the 15 properties are occupied by estate families, or whether any overlap with land the declaration earmarked for youth livelihoods — the question this desk flagged as unanswered on 27 October, and which remains unanswered. It does not say whether the leasing agreements have been signed or when they would be, and it gives no lease terms.

It does not reproduce the Hatton Declaration’s eight points, identify the World Bank assessment, or say whether the Presidential Secretariat has replied to Ganesan’s letter. The Daily Mirror’s text carries a misspelling in one quoted passage and a garbled closing sentence; that final passage is not reproduced here because its wording is unclear in the original.

Single source. This statement was published at 8.37 p.m. Colombo time and no other verified newsroom had filed on it. This desk searched NewsFirst, Hiru News, EconomyNext, Daily FT, island.lk, Daily News, News.lk, Colombo Gazette and Tamil Guardian. Tamil Guardian carries a related report on Jeevan Thondaman making a similar accusation over plantation land pledged to young people, but the site returned HTTP 403 to this desk on two separate fetch routes, so that report could not be dated, read or attributed, and is not cited here.