Up Country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka human wellbeing, and social rights, though they hold the legal form of citizenship. This builds on earlier studies (Sivapragasam 2011; Kanapathipillai 2009; Kader 2017; Shunsuke 2013; Hettige 2003) which indicate that the Plantation Community have been living under privatised plantation management with limited access to administrative agencies and public services. Bass (2012, 75) argues, “Up-country Tamils have been unable to exercise their social citizenship rights since they often are excluded from official representations and discussions of Sri Lankan society, therefore, many people remain in poverty on the plantations”. This shows that the legal form of citizenship has had insufficient impact on subjective wellbeing, social citizenship, and access to governance among the people of the plantations. These studies, however, have not focused much on institutional variables or factors such as quality and working of public institutions, institutional characteristics (impartiality, fairness, and rule of law principles, effectiveness and institutional neutrality) and nature of public institutions, and their influence in accessing governance structures. These factors remain significant in measuring the quality of a government and citizens’ access to public services (Rothstein and Teorell 2008). These variables are closely linked with theories of public administration and governance—the founders of the theory argue that citizens’ access to governance structures highly depend on the impartial and fair working of public administration, and input (policymaking) as well as output side (policy implementation) of the policy process. Furthermore, they went on to argue that policy implementers and public officials from top to down shall adhere to the key principles of impartiality, fairness, and rule of law, which is a procedural norm, where public officials do not consider anything about citizens’ status, ethnicity, 24