The plantation industry in Tamil Nadu today appealed to the five commodity boards under Ministry of Commerce to sanction a one-time grant-inaid to the affected plantations to enable them to restore normalcy following an unprecedented calamitous situation.
The state government should provide financial aid to plantation managements to restore the badly damaged estate roads in public interest, Plantation Association of Tamil Nadu secretary, Pradeep Sukumar said in a release here.
The plantation areas in Tamil Nadu have been experiencing very high rainfall and consequential damage, as was the case of rain havoc in Kerala and Kodagu in Karnataka, it said.
The year 1961-62 is often considered to be the benchmark year for rainfall comparison, when during a five-month period between April to August 1961, parts of the Valparai area in Coimbatore district received a total of 5,242 mm of rainfall.
However, for the same period in 2018, the rainfall has already touched 5,240 mm even as on August 21 and the final reading is likely to far exceed the 1961 levels by this month end, if rain forecasts are anything to go by, he said in the release.
The Pollachi Valparai Highway has remained cut off for nearly a week due to landslide and so is the case with the inter-state highway between Valparai and Chalakkudi in Kerala, thereby making Valparai an almost inaccessible island.
With a shortage of fuel supply, prices of essentials have also shot up, he added.
Sukumar claimed continuous rain with practically no sunshine since July has led to a severe drop in the green tea leaf crop harvest, which has already contributed to a significant loss of made tea production from the Anamallais region.
Crop harvests in other tea growing regions of the state like the Nilgiris district, Highways in Theni District and Manjolai in Tirunelveli are also on a sharp downfall, he said.
Noting that production of rubber latex in rubber plantations in Kanyakumari District has also been badly affected due to inability of workers to tap the rubber trees because of continuous rain, Sukumar said coffee crop in parts of the State has begun to witness leaf rot disease, due to prolonged wet weather.
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