Tamil Nadu - Madurai   

“Sumangali Scheme comes in handy for foreign firms”

AGAINST SCHEMING:Annie Raja, General Secretary, National Federation of Indian Women, addressing a meet in the city on Friday.

MADURAI: Foreign firms were the real beneficiaries of ‘Sumangali Scheme' under which thousands of unmarried girls in the State got employment in private textile mills on the promise of being paid a lump sum towards their marriage expenses after three years of labour, said Annie Raja, General Secretary, National Federation of Indian Women, the women's wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI).

Addressing a conference on ‘Sumangalis: The contemporary faces of bonded labourers' organised by a group of non-governmental organisations here on Friday, she said that foreign companies were cleverly cashing in on the sentiments of Indian women and exploiting them indirectly through the domestic textile industry in order to purchase good quality knitwear at cheaper rates.

“This scheme is certainly not framed for the benefit of you and me. It cannot be called illegal, because it is not against any law. But I would say that it is a conspiracy hatched for sustaining the profits of foreign companies by taking advantage of the Tamil culture in which women attach great importance to the ‘Thali' (a sacred thread worn around the neck by married women),” she said.

Stating that this kind of conspiracy could not be allowed to continue in any form, Ms. Raja called upon the Tamil Nadu Government to ban the Sumangali Scheme. She said that this must be the first and last conference on the scheme and that it should be eradicated at the earliest without necessitating yet another meet.

Tale of woes

Earlier, many victims of the scheme shared their bitter experiences with the participants of the conference. Twenty-one-year-old S. Annathai from Tuticorin district said that she was among 10 girls who joined a textile mill in Coimbatore under the scheme. She and three others were cheated by the mill which did not pay the promised amount of Rs.30,000 even after four years of service.

“The agent who took us to the mill promised that we would be paid Rs.25 a day apart from the lump sum. But, in reality, the mill deducted Rs.10 a day towards food expenses and paid us only Rs.15. The money was deducted even if some of the girls doze off due to tiredness and fail to consume food. We were not even provided with basic medical facilities,” she said.

The woman also said that the labourers were allowed to make phone calls to their parents only once a month and the mill managers use to overhear the conversation to ensure that the girls do not pass on any complaints. Concurring with her, K. Kavitha of Dindigul district said that she and her elder sister were also not given the lump sum stating that the mill had incurred a huge loss of business.

C. Mahendran, Deputy Secretary of CPI; J. John, Executive Director of Delhi-based Centre for Education and Communication; Henri Tiphagne, Executive Director of People's Watch, a Madurai-based non-governmental organisation, and others spoke.

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