An Evaluation of National Housing Policy Related to Plantation Housing in Sri Lanka

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.