Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2019 1(1) physical access. 110 Of the remaining 12 interviewees who indicated that access has not improved, seven were also unable to access schools prior to 2003, meaning that nearly a quarter of those interviewed are entirely reliant on estate schools. One such person was Annamalai, a 52-year-old male from Passara, who stated: ‘When I was young, my family faced many financial problems, and there was the high cost of transport, so because of that I was unable to attend town schools. The same reasons are also preventing my children from going to school outside the estate today’. 111 Four of the remaining five interviewees have had access to non-estate schools all along, and one reported that a non-estate school was the only available school during his youth. 3 Employment More than half of all survey respondents indicated that access to formal employment outside of one’s respective estate has improved since 2003. 112 Access has improved more for urban rather than rural respondents, and for women. 113 The majority or rural respondents have indicated that access to such opportunities has not improved, and of particular concern, Dickoya is again substantially overrepresented in these findings with only four out of 12 male respondents indicating that access has indeed improved. 114 When asked whether access to formal employment outside the estate has improved since the 2003 grant of citizenship, the majority of interviewees (17/29) indicated that access has not improved, with a near equal representation of women and men indicating that this was so (eight women and nine men). The majority of those reporting an improvement in access or entitlement to formal employment outside of the Estate since 2003 were already able to secure such employment prior to the grant of citizenship, suggesting that little has changed for those who were unable to access said employment prior to 2003. The claim of ‘no opportunities’ predominates for those interviewees who are rurally located. Further, it is only in rural regions where transport issues were reported as preventing interviewees from seeking employment, as articulated by Annamalai, who remarked: ‘We don’t have a place outside [the estate] because of transportation problems. There are so many vacancies in town, but we can’t go to 110 Though this may suggest that there is no gendered division in terms of physical access to 111 112 113 114 schools beyond the estate, this should only be read as a provisional finding that overlooks the historical subordination of women within the plantation labour regime, and how the forces of social reproduction continue to impact access to services. Although women perform the most vital element of plantation labour, the very plucking of tea upon which the plantation economy rests, it is also women who perform ‘most of the (unpaid) care work within the household’: Jayarwardena and Kurian (n 47) 247. Because of the unspoken expectation for women to attend to children, the sick and the elderly, the imposed responsibility to ensure that one’s household is kept in order, and finally the need to contribute to household income by way of waged work on the plantation, some women may shoulder an undue work load, a ‘second shift’: Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift (Penguin Books 2003). For this reason, women may not have the same ease of access to schools beyond the estate as compared with their male counterparts, raising the question of how the forces of social reproduction delineate women’s access to education. Interview with Annamalai (Patrick Balazo, 10 August 2016). Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 6. 22