Charting Uncertain Futures: Diaspora, Citizenship and Belonging among Up-country Tamils excluded estates as private entities (Ramesh, Sathis, and Pradeep 2011, 2). Tea estates are in many ways more like Free Trade Zones than the surrounding countryside. However, key differences do exist. Notably, estate workers have had trade unions since they were legalised in the 1930s, while unionising is stifled in Free Trade Zone garment factories. Nevertheless, the colonial legacy of estates as separate from the rest of the country remains partly intact. Estate residents were counted in terms of apportioning local government representation, but could not avail themselves of local government services until just recently – and even now, only with the permission of the estate management. International NGOs, rather than the Sri Lankan government, have funded most of the development work on estates in recent decades, especially in education. As Joseph, an Up-country Tamil politician explained to me, “Only now they are doing some road development and other things … but it is not treated as a village, like down South or the North East or anywhere in the country”. To Up-country Tamils, estates are their homes, but to outsiders, including government officials, they are primarily commercial operations. Since privatisation of the plantations in 1993, the central government has increasingly neglected up-country tea estates, leaving them to their corporate masters and concentrating attention on low- and mid-country tea estates, which are primarily owned by Sinhala smallholders. In spite of good intentions, the push for greater local governance is not likely to succeed for reasons both internal and external to the up-country. Internally, there is little push for greater local government representation at a grassroots level. Most Up-country Tamils are unaware of the inequality that persists in 7