SL planters say harvesting efficiency of available workforce crucial for industry survival
View(s):Sri Lankan Regional Plantation Companies (RPCs), with a view to ensure the sustainability of a rapidly failing industry, are introducing suitable ‘tea harvesters’ on certain estates to improve productivity. To support plantations workers too in improving productivity, RPCs are mulling greater use of manual shears, recent experiments of which have shown early encouraging signs. In most of the estates managed by the RPCs, in which the workers were given training to use manual shears, an approximately 4kg increase has been witnessed in the daily plucking average (compared with the previous year).
In order to improve the plucking efficiency and to overcome the shortage of pluckers, more and more estates are resorting to the use of harvesting shears. Compared with other competing tea economies, figures indicate that the labour productivity of Sri Lankan Tea pluckers is very low, according to a media release from the Planters Association (PA). Shears, the release said, will mitigate this anomaly to some degree but greater effort is required to catch up with the outputs of other countries.
The labour component in the cost of production is close to 67 per cent – 70 per cent of the total cost of production of a 1kg of made tea and the harvesting operation is the most labour intensive and the most expensive item in the cost of production – accounting for 45 per cent of the total cost.
This is a result of the daily plucking output of local pluckers being in the region of 18 kg whilst in Kenya it is around 60 kg – 70 kg, in South India over 50 kg and in North India over 36 kg. ”Besides improvement in productivity, use of shears benefits both the estate and the worker. Despite early objections due lack of familiarity, workers too have often later demonstrated willingness to use manual shears as they avoid certain issues with hand plucking – such as staining of fingers etc. Manual shears have also been found to be more beneficial to the health of the tea bush by contributing to improvement of ‘maintenance foliage’ and eliminating below-level harvesting etc,” it said.
“The RPCs are assisting workers to improve productivity through various means, as it is critical for the sustainability of the country’s plantation industry, given that there is significant room for improvement in the productivity front in comparison with competitor nations,” Roshan Rajadurai, PA Chairman – which represents the RPCs – said. To assist and motivate workers to improve productivity, RPCs have undertaken other initiatives such as providing uniforms for plucking staff and have adopted good agricultural practices to improve yields of tea estates.