‘Names of more than 1,800 Manjolai tea estate workers have been removed from the electoral roll after SIR’

After the closure of Manjolai tea estate, which forced the workers to leave this scenic place where they lived for four or five generations, has also left many workers ‘voteless’ as their names have been left out from the electoral roll after the Special Intensive Revision drive.

When the tea estate was born in the Western Ghats above Manimuthar Dam in 1927, the landless labourers from composite Tirunelveli district’s rural areas, mostly Scheduled Castes, were taken to raise the tea plantations and nearly 20% of the workforce was from neighbouring Kerala also.