Tea Pickers' Daughters Reap Gains in Indian State

MUNNAR, India (WOMENSENEWS)--Kalaiselvi has spent more than three decades working on a tea plantation in Munnar, a verdant, river-ringed town in a mountainous region called the Western Ghats.

Each morning after dawn breaks, she and a group of other female tea pickers don headscarves and protective vests and troop single file from their simple, one-story homes to the hillside tea fields. They pluck oblong tea leaves with lightning-quick fingers, filling their baskets and bags while chatting and laughing as the sun rises.

"We harvest tea as a group of 40 to 60 women, and that's what makes it enjoyable," said Kalaiselvi, who spoke to Women's eNews through an interpreter. "Still, I'm glad my daughter is in school and not in the fields with me. Because she was able to get a better education, she is attending nursing school while I only finished ninth grade. She has more choices and will likely have a better life."

In recent decades, Kalaiselvi's native state, Kerala, has instituted measures to improve female education, health and economic security.

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