The role of representative bureaucracy in protecting administrative rights of Estate Tamil community (a study based on Kolonna divisional secretariat division)

Abstract

Most of the countries in the world consist of pluralistic societies. The social fabric of these countries have diversified by class, colour, country of origin, ethnicity, gender, religious and linguistic determinations and as these countries are incapable of managing this diversity, social groups in that countries have faced to discriminations, exclusions and marginalization. Most of these countries have implemented the representative bureaucracy as a strategy to resolve this problem and provide equal service through public administration including Sri Lanka. But as a minority group in Sri Lanka, estate Tamils have been discriminated and marginalized. Objective of this research is to identify the role of representative bureaucracy in protecting administrative rights of estate Tamil communities. As the research area Poddana and Sooriyakanda estates in Kolonna DS division were selected. The qualitative method was used to collect data. Primary data were collected using in-depth interviews and secondary data were\ collected using literatures such as books, journal articles, reports and internet sources. Collected data was presented using the thematic writing method and data analysis was done by using descriptive analysis. The main factor that was identified by analysing the data of the study area was that this estate Tamil community was highly marginalized when obtaining the administrative services because they are the minority. The other factors for this discrimination were lack of language proficiency in both administrative officials and people in this community, poverty, inability to prove the legal identity because of the enclosure estate life and lack of assistance in public administration.