The once sprawling lanes and buzzing industrial sections of Madanapalle Spinning Mills, popularly known as ‘Cotton Mill’, is now infested with weeds. The company, which saw its glorious days with more than 3,000 workers in the 1970s, were reduced to a unit of only 300 workers when its lockdown was announced in 2014.
Till the early 90s, the spinning mill ran under the patronage of politically influential K.M. Krishna Reddy family. The unit later said to have seen many owners including some hailing from Karnataka. After its lockdown, just for the presence of a few watchmen, its ownership has slipped into obscurity. Once in a while, a small group of former workers stage protests, demanding clearance of their pending wages and other retirement benefits.
According to the police and revenue officials, the management came forward to dole out ₹6 crore to end the travails of agitating workers, but the latter is reluctant to accept it as their claim stood at ₹22 crore. The revenue officials say that the factory with land property close to 100 acres is under mortgage with several banks.
“We don’t have full-fledged information about the value of the property or amount for which it has got pledged, as it has no links with the workers’ demands,” says a revenue official requesting anonymity.
K. Munikrishna, a native of Madanapalle, recalls the golden days of the factory. “My father had worked in the factory for three decades. I also worked there as a daily wager when I was studying Intermediate. The factory the had helped me earn money to continue my studies. More than 3000 employees used to work here in three shifts in the 1970s,” he says.
Mr. Munikrishna refers to a local saying in Madanapalle. “Who gets a job in this spinning mill would also get a good bride. Those were glorious days. The factory’s bad days began with a crisis gripping cotton production after 1993. It led to a drastic slump in the production of yarn. The number of workers kept plummeting. From round-the-clock shifts, the workload reduced to few hours,” says Padmavathi from Tamballapalle, who worked in the factory in the 80s.
A worker who claims an arrear of over ₹10 lakh from the factory management says that considering the assets of the factory, the amount due to the workers is ‘not very big’. “I admit that 90% of the workers were given justice before the lockdown. Those who were working at the time of lockdown are suffering now,” he says.
The local people deplore that the chances of revival of the Madanapalle mills are remote, given the monopoly of the textile industries concentrated in the northern States. “Most of the workers have left for Bengaluru or Chennai in search of jobs,” says a representative of an NGO, who supported the workers’ families during the coronavirus pandemic.
