Poorly-paid workers send their children away, because it means one less mouth to feed and the promise of additional income. There are no official figures of child labour in Sri Lanka. Unofficial estimates vary from 100,000 to 500,000 children who are illegally employed, but government officials say this number is exaggerated. In the dollar-earning plantations, where the workers live in abject poverty, their children are like ''slaves at home and outside. They have no rights, no freedom.
Education is a luxury, work is compulsory.
Incest is accepted,'' says an aid worker, who ran a health clinic for 14 months on a tea plantation. The problem goes back to the 1860s when the British, colonial rulers of Sri Lanka then called Ceylon, shipped in thousands of poor Tamils from south India to work as cheap labour here in tea plantations in the central highlands. They were housed in barrack-type ''line'' rooms and barely ventured out of their homes or the tea estates. Invariably, with tea being a labour intensive industry, the children were also roped in to work from a young age, between 12 and 14 years. Some were compelled to work in the homes of the British managers of estates as ''houseboys'' or ''housegirls''.