Friday, May 30, 2003
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Kerala
By Our Staff Reporter
The report containing observations and recommendations made by the team, which visited the crisis-ridden tea gardens of the Gudulur and Valparai regions, was released at Peermade (Idukki district) on Tuesday. The major recommendations in the report include: fixation of a minimum floor price for the tea from small growers, ban on introduction of modern technology like mechanical harvesters and shears, launching of quality and productivity upgradation schemes for small growers, and changes, including computerisation, in the tea auction system to make it transparent, competitive and accountable. The report has also called for the introduction of steps to reopen the tea plantations, which have been closed down. If the managements failed to restart functioning, they should be handed over to workers' cooperatives, the report says. The fact-finding team has found that the condition of the workers, especially women and casual labourers in the crisis-ridden plantations, was awfully miserable. Many are on the verge of starvation; in many cases, children had to discontinue studies; medical care had to be stopped and marriages have been postponed. In many cases, power and water supply have been stopped. In some of the plantations, which have been abandoned, the workers themselves pluck and sell the leaves to earn a living. Interestingly, the report noted, in these plantations it was the labourers who were paying the managers their salary. Even as their daily wages came down, the workload in all the tea plantations has increased in a major way, the report says. In addition, the number of labourers and working days has been reduced. In spite of the companies complaining that it was otherwise, workers' productivity has gone up on account of the introduction of shears plucking. The report also points to the incidence of sexual harassment of women workers by field officers, supervisors and even by the management. The report has taken note of the special problems being faced by the small growers of the Nilgiris. Nearly 60,000 families owning plantations of five to 10 acres each are totally dependent on tea production and there are around three lakh people either directly or indirectly dependent on tea cultivation in the area. These growers are directly hit by the steep fall in the auction price of tea. They sell their green leaves not only to the bought leaf factories, but also to the big companies, which also buy processed tea from the bought leaf factories at cheaper rates in the auctions. Today, the small grower has found it difficult to get out of this vicious circle they have fallen into, as the only winner in the game is the big companies which get both green leaf and processed tea at very cheap rates, only to sell it as packed tea at exorbitant prices. The report has also called for more transparency in the functioning of the factories run by the Industrial Development Cooperative Society, which caters to nearly 21,000 small growers. The report has pointed out that the present crisis in the tea plantation industry was not part of a global phenomenon, but was India-specific.
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