The original Land Act of 1960 governing the development of Felda scheme areas does not specify that settlers need to be Malays while the agency’s own policy guidelines permit it to recruit 30% non-Malays.
By P. Uthayakumar
Felda has said ‘No’ to any upward mobility opportunities for second and third generation Indian rubber tappers.
We estimate only a mere 0.1% of the poor and landless, especially Indian rubber tappers and plantation workers and other Indians, may have been granted the state sponsored 10 acres land ownership schemes in Felda, Felcra, Risda, Fama, Agropolitan, Kejora, Mada etc. (Refer Berita Harian page 2 on Dec 21, 2009).
click on image to enlarge
If we are wrong, the Umno government should declare the statistics – which we know they will never do, for it will expose the truth completely and will shame them.
To add insult to injury, when the plantations that the Indian tappers have been working for all their lives come up for development, the older workers are left without a house over their heads, as everything is taken away and they are just thrown out.
The young are denied any form of skills training by Umno and end up as security guards, cleaners, garbage collectors, road sweepers, office boys, lorry drivers, taxi drivers or as a last resort indulge in gangsterism, crime etc. And Umno wants it this way.
But for the second and third generation Malay Muslim Felda settlers, Umno plans for them to compete even at the international level – 85,000 Malay Muslims from Felda having secured higher education. In 2005, 161 children of Felda settlers secured PhDs, 5,000 got into UiTM (this number out of the 8,000 in institutions of higher learning).
Prime Minister Najib Razak’s ‘One Malay-sia’?
(First published Dec 21, 2009 in www.humanrightspartymalaysia.com)
************************************
It’s not too late to correct this injustice
By Dr Lim Teck Ghee
There is plenty of blame to go around with regard to the marginalization of rural Indians. A momentous opportunity to put this right was lost between the 60s and 80s when the Felda schemes selected settlers almost entirely from one ethnic group.
Note that the original Land (Group Settlement Areas) Act of 1960 governing the development of scheme areas does not specify any ethnic preference in settler recruitment, merely requiring settlers to be Malaysian citizens.
Also, Felda’s own policy guidelines permit it to recruit 30% of any scheme population from non-Malays for schemes that are located outside Malay reservation areas.
Yet despite sizable numbers of needy and deserving non-Malay rural poor, especially Indians, little effort has been given by the Government to recruiting non-Malay settlers in its land development schemes.
In 1980, the World Bank lent its voice to concerns over the ethnic bias in settler selection by pointing out that if the government was serious “about increasing the non-Malay share in agriculture, some increase in the non-Malay share of settlers was warranted.???
It was especially concerned about Indian estate workers who faced increasing under-employment following the estates’ conversion from rubber to oil palm and who in normal circumstances “would be good candidates for land development schemes.??? (see Lim Teck Ghee and Richard Dorall, “Contract Farming in Malaysia??? in D. Glover and Lim Teck Ghee, eds. Contract Farming in Southeast Asia: Three Country Studies, Kuala Lumpur, 1992).
The World Bank’s concerns – and that of numerous other Malaysian organizations and individuals – went unheeded. No change whatsoever was permitted to the policy emphasizing Malay participation and restricting non-Malay participation in rural development programs.
The Felda schemes have been lauded for their outstanding success in poverty alleviation but as with many other success stories in the country, it is one tainted by the discriminatory policies embedded in them.
Today, some 20 odd years later, the damage has been done. Many rural Indians and their children remain deeply mired in hopeless and never-ending poverty. But it is not too late to correct this historical and ongoing injustice.
Table 16-9
Development Allocation for Distributional Programmes, 2006-2010 (RM million)
Source: EPU Malaysia
The 9th Malaysia Plan has allocated RM11.5 billion for distributional programs or over RM$2 billion a year between 2006 and 2010 (see Table 16-9).
Let us all good Malaysians (including S. Samy Vellu) exercise vigilance over this expenditure to ensure that all poor and marginalized Malaysians – including poor Indians – get their fair share of the allocation.
Let us use our democratic right to pressure agencies and state and federal level governments to provide the details of land alienation and settlement programmes, and account for who have benefited and who have been excluded.
Many years ago, the British colonial government in Malaya was accused of treating the Indians like oranges, sucked up and spat out as pips; today, our own Government must be asked to explain why there seems to be little change in policy towards rural Indians.