Keralan Landscapes and Tea Fields: Munnar

The Keralan landscape is by far the most diverse and most green I have seen in India. Our four hour journey from Kochi to Munnar treated us to palm trees, plains, rice paddies, hills, cardamom fields, mountains, deciduous forests, and deep river valleys. But nothing prepared us for the sight of Munnar's famed endless tea fields that vanish off into the distance in every direction. Everywhere we turned, our sights were filled with the lush green carpet of Assam tea growing on the slopes of the Western Ghats. The intense green gave a pleasant contrast to the clean, clear blue skies above.

I resisted the urge to stop every thirty seconds to take a picture... Yet I still ended up with 50 pictures of tea fields at the end of our day... We honestly didn't do a lot in Munnar except ogle at the amazing teafield scenery and walk amongst them. The plants live for a 125 years and between 10-15 leaves are harvested from each bush every month. And with as much tea as Indian's drink, at that rate, you have to have a lot of bushes! But really, the most fascinating part was the story of the business underlying these fields.

While there are a number of companies operating on the Western Ghats, the largest by far is the multinational, multi-faceted Indian giant, the Tata Group. Their Tata Tea fields made up for 75% of the tea growing in and around Munnar. Tata is a real behemoth. In a developing country like India, startups have a difficult time raising capital, so it's the established companies that are able to enter a variety of markets to reap a profit by transferring capital from one industry to another. The Tata Group is a shining example of this. They operate in SEVEN business sectors. They do everything from building cars to offering satellite TV, from selling power to managing five-star hotels, and from providing life insurance to producing copious quantities of tea. They are, for lack of a better phrase, all over the place. They employ many people in Munnar in their production of the famed Tata Tea that so many millions of Indians drink on a daily basis. Their harvesters work all day in the field harvesting tea from the tops of the shrubs. The constant preening flattens the tops of the bushes and gives Munnar its famed green-carpet look. Let's marvel at how well-paid these harvesters are (not!). They are paid by the kilo of tea they harvest. All of 50 paisa per kilo. Now if this were marble, it'd be a different story. But think about how much freakin' tea you have to pick to get even ONE kilo! And for that someone pays you ONE CENT. Oh wait, no, the field managers (overseer) pad their own salaries by not issuing payment for every 10th kilo that is harvested.

I thought I wasn't getting paid enough for my "hard work" for Kaplan. Damn.