STATELESSNESS IN SRI LANKA Did you know that Sri Lanka also has a considerable history tied up with the issue of statelessness? Here is some basic background information. We hope you will research into this area further. Stateless population in Sri Lanka Some segments of the Sinhala community resented this growth of the Tamil population and pressured the government to send these people back to India. And so one of the first things that took place as soon as Sri Lanka received Independence in 1948 was that the government introduced the Ceylon Citizenship Bill. During the British rule, Tamils from Tamil Nadu were recruited to work in tea, coffee and coconut plantations of Ceylon. Due to the continuous recruitment that took place and also the fast rate at which this population grew, by 1921 this group of people – commonly referred to as Hill Country Tamils constituted 13.5 percent (602,700) of the total population of the country. By 1936, this number and the percentage had risen even further. The Hill Country Tamils now numbered 1,123,000 or 15.3 percent of the total population and many of these were not citizens of Ceylon. They didn’t belong to either India or Ceylon. This act granted citizenship to about 5,000 Hill Country Tamils. However, more than 700,000 people (about 11%) were either non-citizens of Ceylon or became stateless. 8