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Labour shortage threatens to pluck joy out of Lanka tea industry

The boom in Sri Lanka's tea industry could turn into gloom if steps are not quickly taken to overcome an impending labour shortage, experts in Colombo have warned.

Behind the looming crisis is the disillusionment of the Tamils of Indian origin, who form the bulk of the estate labour, to free themselves from the virtual bondage of the past 200 years and venture out of the plantations in search of greener pastures.

''It is a question of dignity and self-respect,'' says W W D Modder, director of the Tea Research Institute of Sri Lanka. ''We have to restore the dignity of the tea plucker and provide him with good living and working conditions. It has to be comparable to the conditions outside the industry,'' he said.

Failure to do that could spell doom for the island's famed tea industry, which is the backbone of the economy, helping it to earn millions of dollars in foreign exchange.

Tea exports fetched nearly $ 700 million last year. The estates have already begun to feel the problem of labour shortage, though it was partly the creation of the private companies which took over the management of the plantations under the government's privatisation programme.

Faced with the worst drought in 1992, the managements had drastically reduced the work force. ''We had to do something to stop the haemorrhage,'' said an estate manager, but agreed that such measures would not have been resorted under government management.

By the time the boom period for tea came, many workers had found alternative work, like in the construction industry, which paid them better wages.

The importance of the skilled tea plucker in producing quality Ceylon tea (as it is still known in the international market) cannot be over-emphasised.

The TRISL has found that while a plucking machine developed by it could help reduce the number of pluckers per hectare, it could not replace skilled human hand.

The warning bells about the impending labour shortage have been ringing for sometime now, but successive governments had failed to address the problem because of fear that the credit for any step taken to improve the lot of the estate labour would go to the trade union leaders.

Thus the Sinhala leadership sought to clip the wings of powerful Ceylon Workers' Congress representing a majority of the one-million strong Tamil plantation workers, and its leader and cabinet minister S Thondaman by keeping the estate population out of all developmental schemes.

So, even as Sri Lanka touted its economic and health fundamentals as a model for the Third World, the estate population always remained outside the ambit of these creditable achievements.

The spread of education -- there are an estimated 250,000 children studying in the plantation schools now as against only 80,000 two decades ago -- and the incursion of television in the region, has induced the estate youth to think of a life outside the drudgery of the plantations.

Most of the educated want to have white collar jobs, while the more ambitious want to be doctors, engineers and politicians. Few want to work in the estates, like their parents.

Some planters realise the gravity of the problem and have already started taking remedial measures.

Great Western company has modernised its factory to improve the work atmosphere and provided, among others, uniforms to its workers.

''Earlier, we used to call them coolies, now we call them tea estate workers,'' said Roshan Rajadura, manager of the Pedro Estate and secretary of the Nuwara Eliya District Planters Association. ''We may have to call the pluckers tea-harvesting technicians, or tea technicians and make them part of the management so that they feel they are no more coolies,'' he said.

The planters said the estate youth, even with modest educational levels of matriculation or higher secondary, were willing to work only as supervisors, though plucking jobs were easily available and fetched between Rs 6,000 and Rs 7,000 a month.

Rajadurai said one of the plans being contemplated by estate owners to overcome the possible labour shortage was to give up tending uneconomic fields and thus reduce the area under tea.

UNI