‘Names of more than 1,800 Manjolai tea estate workers have been removed from the electoral roll after SIR’

‘Names of more than 1,800 Manjolai tea estate workers have been removed from the electoral roll after SIR’

After the closure of Manjolai tea estate, which forced the workers to leave this scenic place where they lived for four or five generations, has also left many workers ‘voteless’ as their names have been left out from the electoral roll after the Special Intensive Revision drive.

When the tea estate was born in the Western Ghats above Manimuthar Dam in 1927, the landless labourers from composite Tirunelveli district’s rural areas, mostly Scheduled Castes, were taken to raise the tea plantations and nearly 20% of the workforce was from neighbouring Kerala also.

While the hostile terrain and extremely cold weather conditions drove away a portion of this workforce back to their villages, the tea estate management managed to retain the remaining families by creating basic facilities, places of worship, hospital, school etc. A burial ground was also identified that psychologically stopped the worker from leaving the tea estate spread across stunningly beautiful Manjolai, Ooththu, Kaakkaachi, Naalumukku and Kuthiraivetti.

“We had Devendrakula Velaalar, Arunthathiyar, Paraiyar, Nadar, Thevar, Yadhava, Pillai, Eezhava and Nair communities in the tea gardens. The beauty of this gated community-like settlement is that the caste divide in the plains vanished in the tea estate and casteless marriages strengthened this social bonding further even in early 1950s. More than 500 love marriages have been conducted so far in the tea estate. Even though the Arunthathiyar were involved in sanitary operations, this practice was stopped in 1960 and people from all communities were assigned this job,” says advocate Robert Chandrakumar.

Even though the protest for increased wages and subsequent murder of supervisor Antony Muthu in October 1998 in Manjolai and subsequent conviction of a few in this case destabilised the peaceful living of the workers, normalcy returned. As the operation of the tea estate came to an end much before the actual deadline of 2028, the workers’ families have started moving to the plains from the tea estate.

Earlier, two polling booths each at Manjolai and Nalumukku were created while Ooththu had one booth to enable the 1,906 voters under Ambasamudram Assembly constituency to exercise their franchise. After the workers started leaving for the plains ahead of the permanent closure of the tea estate, 652 voters submitted their applications during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral roll.