Udhagamandalam,25.11.2022 (For TANTEA story) The Pandiyar TANTEA tea factory at Gudalur tea estate. Photo: Sathyamoorthy M/THE HINDU. | Photo Credit: SATHYAMOORTHY M
There is a distinct sense of unease and anxiety at the tea plantations in the Nilgiris. Estate workers are worried about losing their livelihoods, and also possibly being evicted from their homes.
Why is this so?
The Tamil Nadu Tea Plantation Corporation, or TANTEA, has been suffering losses for a while now. Now, the Tamil Nadu government has decided to transfer 2.152 hectares of land under the control of TANTEA, to the Forest department. The government has said it is looking out for the welfare of the workers employed at the estates and the factories.
But the future of TANTEA itself is still in doubt, due to various reasons, and it has generations of its staff, concerned.
The Sri Lankan connection
The primary goal of TANTEA was to provide livelihoods for repatriates from Sri Lanka, till they could find their feet in a new country. TANTEA provided livelihoods for 4,082 people from Sri Lanka, who returned to India as part of the Sirimavo-Shastri Pact. This pact, signed in 1964 between the Sri Lankan and Indian Prime Ministers of the time, Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Lal Bahadur Shastri, was done to repatriate people of Indian origin from Sri Lanka who were recruited by the British to work in tea, coffee and coconut plantations.
Ganesh, a 53-year-old estate worker, is the son of Sri Lankan repatriates. He says that workers had been aware for a while now about the losses suffered by TANTEA.
Why is TANTEA in trouble?
The reasons are both economic, and environmental. A fall in the price of tea leaves and negative human-elephant encounters in the regions where TANTEA estates are located, has led to questions about the viability of maintaining these estates.
Since 2012, TANTEA had leased land from the state forest department to set up these estates. According to officials, it returned around 4,059 hectares back to the forest department. However, production still continues in the remaining land of around 2,400 acres.
D. Venkatesh, Managing Director of TANTEA (in-charge), and Conservator of Forests (Nilgiris), said that TANTEA had been recording losses over the last ten years. He says that the government had only returned “unproductive” estate areas, where there was no cultivation happening, back to the forest department.
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