Painful Injuries Sustained by Tea Pluckers
Image description: Perumal Danalechchumy showing her hands, due to picking tea leaves for work. She's wearing golden/yellow bangles.
Image of Perumal Danalechchumy. Photograph by Maatram.
“I apply castor oil to my fingers and hold them over the fire. That is the medicine. For two days, I can pluck tea. After that, the pain comes back. So I treat my fingers again with castor oil” said tea plucker Perumal Danalechchumy, forty-nine years old.
Danalechchumy has five children; three of them go to school, and the other two work in Colombo. She was sixteen years old when she began plucking tea. Her fingers resemble the drought-parched earth – filled with cracks. The tea stains her hands, like blood.
“Plucking with these injuries is really painful. If you wear gloves, you can’t pluck. What’s to be done. I have to keep plucking, despite the pain.” Nirmala says. In some of the estates, the management discourages workers from wearing protective gloves, as it damages the tea leaves. Due to pain, some of the pluckers wear gloves in secret, despite this. Some others sew makeshift cloth coverings for their fingers.
To produce one kilogramme of tea, five thousand tea-leaves have to be plucked, according to Badulla Hindagala estate, Factory Officer Muthuarachchi.
“On average, Sri Lanka exports seven million kilogrammes of tea for a week. However nobody talks about the way this work injures the pluckers,” Muthuarachchi said. These pluckers spend three-quarters of their lives plucking tea – yet the management does not give them any medicine to treat their hands. They do not receive any compensation for these injuries.
-Rajesh, "Like Drought Parched Earth, The Painful Injuries Sustained by Tea Pluckers," Maatram Rajesh is the editor of maatram.org, which is a Tamil civic media platform based in Sri Lanka.
Maatram post caption in Tamil: ஐந்து பிள்ளைகளின் தாயான பெருமாள் தனலெட்சுமிக்கு இப்போது 49 வயதாகிறது. 16 வயதில் வேலைக்குச் சேர்ந்திருக்கும் இவருக்கு 5 பிள்ளைகள். மூவர் பாடசாலை செல்வதோடு இருவர் கொழும்பில் வேலை செய்வதாகவும் கூறுகிறார். வாய் பேசமுடியாத கணவரால் தொடர்ந்து வேலைக்கும் போகமுடியாது எனக்கூறும் தனலெட்சுமி, வறுமை காரணமாக தன்னுடைய ஒரு மகனை சகோதரர் ஒருவரே வளர்த்தெடுத்தார் என்றும் கூறுகிறார். மேலும் படிக்க: http://maatram.org/?p=6260