Livestock Development and Estate Infrastructure Minister S Thondaman, who is also the leader of the Ceylon Workers' Congress, the largest estate workers' trade union, recently requested the Tamil Nadu Education Minister to send about 800 teachers to the critically understaffed schools of Sri Lanka's tea gardens.

Indian High Commission officials here said the proposal was ``being examined''. It also has to be approved by the Sri Lankan government as Thondaman's request was not made officially, but through an organisation called the Ceylon Estate Workers' Educational Trust of which he is a member and which is supported financially by the Indian government. ``Our attitude is, yes, if the Sri Lankan government wants it,'' a senior Indian official said.

If it goes through, at least500 Tamil-speaking teachers from India will take up positions in understaffed schools in the tea estates, with their salaries paid by the Tamil Nadu government. However, Sinhalese nationalists are already up in arms against the move, describing it as a conspiracy to involve Tamil Nadu in Sri Lankan affairs.

Sri Lanka's tea estates are inhabited by the ethnic group described as `Indian Tamils' to differentiate them from the `Sri Lankan Tamils' of the north-eastern region. They are of recent Indian origin, brought here from Tamil Nadu by the British in the mid-19th century to work on the tea plantations.

Even now, they are the predominant work force in the country's largest industry. But despite forming the backbone of the country's economy, the Indian Tamils, also known as `up-country Tamils', continue to be perhaps the most depressed section of Sri Lankan society and the most discriminated against. Until recently, a majority were `stateless', a consequence of their disenfranchisement by Sri Lanka in the1950s.

Thondaman's plea for assistance from India comes amidst reports of several schools in the plantations closing down, either temporarily or permanently, due to the acute shortage of teachers and the Sri Lankan government's inability to address the problem.

More than a century of neglect of estate workers' education by policy makers -- there were only primary schools in the region till 1977 -- has given rise to a situation where there are few trained Indian Tamils to take on the role of school teachers for the community. Though there are several unemployed Sinhala-speaking teachers, they cannot be deployed in the estate schools which are all Tamil medium. Tamils of north-eastern Sri Lanka have never liked being posted in the estates to teach Indian Tamils, and of late, are in any case not being sent to these areas due to government fears that this might allow the LTTE infiltration into tea gardens, which despite being Tamil, have remained neutral throughout the conflict. The adverse student-teacherratio has contributed to low achievement levels among children from plantations. About 80 per cent of the students fail Mathematics and nearly 70 per cent fail Science in the O-level examinations.