Something surprising happened during an experiment to empower workers at Thenmallay, a tea plantation nestled on a misty plateau between the heavy monsoons of eastern Kerala and the drier uplands of Tamil Nadu in south India.
When Tata Tea, the then owner, withdrew its managers from the plantation in April 2004 and told the 600-odd pluckers to manage the estate themselves, productivity plummeted. After three months, the pilot project was pronounced a disaster. "The drive and efficiency that had made Thenmallay our most productive tea garden suddenly vanished," says Chacko Thomas, a former field manager at Thenmallay, part of Tata Tea's largest estate in south India.
The initiative was one of several options considered by Tata Tea after it decided to quit the volatile business of growing tea and concentrate instead on selling higher margin branded beverages. A sale to a third party had been rejected, Tata Tea says, because it could not win assurances on job security and the environment. Though the experiment was disappointing, it did, however, prompt another course of action.
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