Forced Out of Their Own Land: Sinhala Colonisation in the Vanni

The Kivul Oya project exemplifies a decades-long pattern in which the Sri Lankan state uses irrigation and settlement schemes to dispossess Tamil communities in the North-East. Framed as development, the scheme follows earlier projects like Mahaweli System L, altering ethnic demographics, renaming Tamil landscapes in Sinhala, and displacing agricultural livelihoods while promising benefits that rarely reach the people whose land is taken.