Abstract:
Sri Lanka provides more than 50% share of the Tea as a beverage in the world
market, but tea estate families are some of the poorest in the country. They
live in line houses with deteriorated conditions. Providing adequate housing in
the urban, rural and estate sectors is a major challenge. The National Housing
Policy 2019 (NHP2019) has sought to address this issue based on principles of
participatory planning and social inclusion, economic effectiveness,
environmental protection, and cultural adequacy. Purpose of this research is
to evaluate the NHP2019 in terms of the tea plantation sector and to assess
whether the policy successfully addresses housing issues of this sector. The
study is based on three case studies of Diagama estate, Thalangaha estate
and Gee-Kiyana Kanda estate. Further it evaluates the NHP2019, in terms of
appropriateness of the problem identification, developing the solution (policy
formulation) and effectiveness on real ground application (policy
implementation) using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods. The data
collection involved a questionnaire survey with a proportionate sample of 172
households selected from three estates, an expert opinion survey with eight
experts, and eight focus group discussions. The qualitative analysis was based
on a content analysis using NVivo 11 software, and correlations and
descriptive statistics were used for the quantitative analysis. The findings
revealed that the NHP has not given due attention to the concerns of tea
producers at the problem identification and policy formulation stages. There
are also limitations of implementation such as no action on previous line
rooms, land tenure, limitation on small loan programmes, productive land use
for housing construction, issues in fund allocation and infrastructure provision.
This research highlights the importance of policy reviews and revisions, which
is rare in the practice of Sri Lanka.
