How do the leaves with which you make your cup of tea reach you?

Thousands of workers in Munnar remain in a fix as their children no longer want to toil in the tea garden, plucking leaves, trudging up and down steep slopes with heavy baskets, braving the sun and rain, wild animals and a wilder fate, writes Angela Ferrao

The journey is long and winding. Starting from the steep tea estates of Munnar and Darjeeling in the North-East. The jagged history of the tea plucker is as rigid as the lines of tea bushes he/she plucks.

Working in the plantation 12 hours a day, a tea plucker is given a home as long as he works. He tries to move out of the cycle of work by educating his children, but if he leaves in between he loses his home. So what the next generation does? It falls in line and continues the cycle of exploitation.

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