Chennai: Promising to strive for getting citizenship to Sri Lankan Tamil refugees who had been living in Tamil Nadu for a long time, Chief Minister M K Stalin said that he would continue to raise his voice in favour of that and expressed the hope that the Indian government would expedite the process.
In a message on his X page on Tuesday, Stalin said the State government was already providing them permanent houses and had spent Rs 11.07 crore on giving scholarships to 5,771 Sri Lankan Tamil students in the State to support their studies in the last three years.
The DMK government was also providing funds to the women Self Help Groups (SHGs) among Sri Lankan Tamils and also arranging for skill development training for the members with a view to improving their livelihood, he said.
Inaugurating a housing colony for Sri Lankan Tamils in Kanyakumari district on Tuesday, Stalin spoke to the residents there and explained the efforts taken by his government to get citizenship for them.
There are about a lakh refugees mostly living in Tamil Nadu. While most of them, around 57,000 live in camps, the rest live outside having registered themselves with the State authorities.
The influx of Sri Lankan Tamils into Tamil Nadu began in 1983 as they fled their homeland for security reasons following the outbreak of the ethnic conflict in the island nation. Now, many families have been living in Tamil soil for three generations. Though the Union Government makes initiatives to repatriate them to their homeland, most of them prefer living in Tamil Nadu.
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