Ooty: The Tea and Tourism Festival opening here on Friday on a gloomy note due to the fall in the price of tea. The event, usually a three-day extravaganza of cultural, dance and music programmes and an exhibition of tea grown in the Nilgiris tea, is organised by the Nilgiris district administration, the tourism department and the Tea Board of India at the HADP open air stadium here. Its aim is to popularise Nilgiris tea while also being an annual winter attraction for tourists.
An added point of interest this year is a two-day traditional food festival being organised by the social welfare department at the venue.Even as arrangements are on for the event, the Nilgiris Tea Cultivators Federation (NTCF) has criticised the organisers for holding the show at a time when lowered tea prices had made tea growers’ lives miserable. Manjai V. Mohan, convener of the NTCF, said in a release that the families of 70,000 Small Tea Growers (STG) in Nilgiris, who form the bulk of the farming community in the hills, were living in distress for the past two years with the green tea leaf (GTL), the produce they supply to the tea processing units, not fetching a remunerative price.
“The STG are given a subsidy, but those who rely on private tea factories are in severe hardship. Nothing has been done so far to fix a floor price for GTL despite judicial intervention on the this issue. The funds allotted for a festival on this scale could go to help the STG,” he added.
