Indians shed rubber tapper image

KUALA LUMPUR: Indians in Malaysia have shed their "rubber tapper" image and have become educated and urbanised, a senior minister said here.

Indians, who form about 10 per cent of the population of Malaysia's 26 million people, were mostly brought here by the British decades ago to work at rubber plantations and to build railway tracks. After independence, many Indians, a majority from Tamil Nadu state, did not go back to India and become a part of the multi-ethnic population of Malaysia.