Camp and non-camp Sri Lankan Refugees in Tamil Nadu

This paper offers an assessment of the situation of Sri Lankan refugees in Tamil Nadu. Sri Lankan refugees started coming to India in huge flows at the beginning of the civil war in 1983. Their situation has changed over the years due to a number of factors, which include, among others, India’s policy towards them, both at the central and state levels, the evolution of the situation in Sri Lanka, and the creation of a regional office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Chennai in 1995. The impact of these factors was felt most notably on security screening for new arrivals, livelihood options, and the questions of further integration in India and possibilities of return, especially since the formal end to the civil war in 2009. This paper will explore the refugees’ experience in migration. What is the refugees’ range of options between a ‘savoir-faire’ that they have developed over the years, thanks notably to their growing experience of life in exile, to a number of non-governmental organizations (OfERR, JRS, FPR), and to a well-developed diasporic network, and a ‘pouvoir-faire’ that they have been granted by Indian authorities either at the central or at the state level and that is limitative? This study will take a historical perspective to determine how and in what institutional context Sri Lankan refugees have come to build survival and other skills in Tamil Nadu, before turning to an assessment of the current situation of Sri Lankan refugees. It will be based on governmental and non-governmental material on Sri Lankan refugees, which include newspapers articles, as well as on interviews conducted in the field between 2012 and 2014 among camp and non-camp refugees, and with non-governmental organisation members