MUNNAR (India): Faced with unemployment in their failing tea estates, about two years ago, tea pluckers in the rolling highlands of Kerala responded by forming cooperatives to buy out their former employers Tata Tea and turn the gardens into profitable enterprises.

So successful has the ‘Munnar story’ of participative management been that the World Bank (WB) recently sent a team to study it, and has plans to back similar initiatives in other major tea-growing areas of India, especially the famed Darjeeling district of West Bengal and in Assam state. “A WB team visited us a few months ago. Clearly impressed by what they saw, the team members said they would be willing to fund similar initiatives in the north-east,” TV Alexander managing director of the cooperative Kanan Devan Hills Plantations (KDHP), which bought out Tata Tea, told in an interview.

The Bank is not the only one to take notice of the ‘quiet revolution’ in the tea gardens of Munnar. India’s commerce minister Jairam Ramesh said, during a visit last month, that his ministry was examining the “KDHP Model” to revive nine other defunct tea gardens.

Ramesh said there were some 20 closed tea gardens in Kerala, affecting nearly 35,000 workers. The new initiative is being discussed with the government of West Bengal state where as many as 17 gardens have been closed, affecting some 50,000 workers.

Chandra, who worked as tea plucker for 17 years now sits on the KDHP board of directors as a representative of the workers. “Earlier, we had nothing to do with profits or losses of the company. But, now, there is a greater sense of responsibility and involvement in these matters,” she said.

Chandra’s presence on the board, once considered a rarefied zone open only to the “bosses”, has helped her to highlight several worker issues such as timely payment of incentives. “With the workers’ day-to-day complaints and expectations finding ready redress, their morale has gone up resulting in greater productivity,” she explained.

The consultative committees hold monthly meetings to advise on such issues as productivity enhancement, cost control, absenteeism and to review the performance of the estate and the factory.—Dawn/The IPS News Service