Kerala beedi industry seeks rehab package

The recent ban on smoking in public places, along with the sudden influx of cheap, unbranded cigarettes, has hit the state beedi industry hard.

Speaking to Business Standard, C Rajan, chairman of Kerala Dinesh Beedi Workers Cooperative Society, a state sponsored undertaking, said, “Worse still is the plight of the beedi employees. With the sector foreseeing an imminent collapse, we have been knocking at the doors of the authorities concerned in a bid to keep the livelihood options of the beedi workers stay afloat. No concrete measure has come about as yet.”

Kerala houses over 300,000 beedi workers of which women constitute 80 per cent.

To make matters worse, the small retail shops have been flooded with unknown filter cigarette brands that come for as cheap as Rs 8 per pack of 10 cigarettes.

The organised sector in the beedi industry has now sought the intervention of the state government in finding measures to rehabilitate the beedi workers. In this regard, the trade unions and the players are planning to come together in Kannur on December 15 and urge for a rehabilitation package from the government. They would discuss the issue with the state labour and industry ministers.

“The players are of the opinion that when a blanket ban was clamped on smoking in private places, the ministry should have also found means to rehabilitate the thousands of families who earn a living out of beedi making. Provident fund and gratuity apart, all they earn is Rs 90 to Rs 160 a day,” Rajan pointed out.

On the crisis Kerala Dinesh faces as the biggest beedi cooperative, Rajan said “as of now, excise duty-evading players, who have been flooding the small retail shops with cheap unbranded filter cigarettes, plus the recent ban on smoking, had resulted in 10,000 rucksacks of 40,000 pieces of beedis each lying in our godowns.”