COIMBATORE: Lakhs of tea pickers have been struggling without adequate income for the past two weeks. With frost continuing to extensively damage tea leaves across the district, they have no leaves to pick.From working six days a week on four to five farms, workers barely manage to get jobs once or twice a week. The situation is likely to continue until mid-February, when rain is expected to clear the frost.Joghee, 37, of Aravenu, who works in a plantation near his house, says, “In every plantation I visit, the leaves are too burnt and cannot be picked. I have visited all the four farms I work at.” They usually manage to work six days a week, taking Sunday off. “We work at 4-5 farms, visiting each farm every 15 days and working for around three days. With all the plantations damaged, we are being sent away by the farmers and we cannot blame them either. All the leaves have turned black.”Frost make the leaves look scorched. “When even mild frost falls on tea leaves, it stunts their growth. It also causes leaf blister,” said Tea Board of India executive director C Paulrasu. “Factories do not buy them.”There are around 50,000 hectares of tea plantations across the Nilgiris, of which around 7,000 come under corporate companies. Nearly 3 lakh people across the hill district work as leaf pickers in these plantations.“We run our families with the ?300 a day we earn five to six days a week,” said another labourer T Ramakrishnan. The women earn around ?200 a day.Small growers with holdings between 1 and 20 hectares say they are the most affected. “We depend on our earnings every fortnight to ensure the cash flow does not get disturbed,” says Thumboor I Bojan, president of the Hill District Small Growers Welfare Association. “We demand a compensation of ?20,000 per acre from the state and that frost should be declared a natural calamity.”“This year because of the extreme low temperatures, the frost is more severe. But it is only plantations in Ooty and Kundha which are severely damaged because temperatures dip to -1 and -2 deg C sometimes,” said Udayabhanu, deputy director, advisory services, Planters Association of Tamil Nadu.

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