The Hindu Business Line : From worker to board director

For around 15 days every year she adorns the starched colourful saree to attend the board meetings of her company. For the remaining part of the year she hoists the tea pluckers bag around her shoulders and resumes her duties as a worker in the largest participatory management tea company in the world.

Meet Ms A. Chandra, the latest entrant on the board of Kanan Devan Hill Plantations Company. Management jargons are passé and this traditional tea plantation worker who has attended classes till standard VIII is equally proud of her humble origins, as she is of her present position. Though still diffident and not articulate in voicing her opinions and demands of her co-workers, she is fast going up the learning curve.

Seventeen years of dedicated and productive service has got her a role on the board of the Rs 105-crore company. "For 15 years, I have successively won the best tea pluckers' award from the company," she says proudly. Last year she bettered her own record by plucking 216 kg of tea leaves a day, up from the 192 kg earlier.

The world has not changed much for this earthy 37-year woman since she was elevated to the top position. Though on the board of a company, which controls the fate and fortunes of 13,124 employees on its rolls, she says: "I still earn the Rs 82.65 wages from the company for a day's work. I still live in the workers lane with the rest of the workers. My son still goes to the same Government school and my husband goes out to work everyday," says the unassuming Ms Chandra, with no trace of discontent in her voice.

While she is passionate about the wage revision, wage arrears and bonus claims of the co-workers, she is equally aware that she has an even more difficult role to play on the board. "She is a quiet and efficient person who is beginning to pick up the ropes in her new role," some of her colleagues on the board said.

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