India: Landslides in Kerala expose how a private empire exploits Dalit workers
"Pettimudi landslide highlights how Kerala’s private plantation empire exploits Dalit workers", 8 September 2020
On the night of 6 August, a fatal landslide struck Pettimudi, a village in Kerala’s Idukki district, amid heavy floods that have become an annual occurrence across the state since 2018. The torrential rainfall, which continued from 1 to 6 August, triggered a landslide that reduced settlements in Pettimudi to rubble and killed over eighty people. Among the people affected in the district were tea plantation workers. A vast majority of them are descendants of Dalit communities from Tamil Nadu, who were brought to Kerala in the British era. But even now, they are branded as “outsiders” within the state.
...The incident highlighted the systemic mistreatment of tea plantation labourers, and the Kerala government’s habit of brazenly ignoring the plight of the community. Left-leaning trade unions in Kerala have for decades worked closely with plantation companies in Idukki district to suppress plantation labourers whose contracts closely resemble bonded labour.
...Plantations in Pettimudi are under the control of Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company Private Limited, or KDHP, an associate company of Tata Consumer Products...
The destruction caused by the Pettimudi landslide highlighted the terrible living arrangements made by plantation companies for the labourers, further underscoring the community’s right to land and a life with dignity. The labourers and their families, regardless of the number of members, are packed into one-room settlements, several of which date back to British Raj...