About the Organisation

The Anamallai Hills carry their name from the Tamil words for elephant and mountain, and the name is well earned. Elephant herds still amble across the estate roads at first light, and workers plucking green leaf on the slopes share their workplace with hornbills, gaur and the occasional shy leopard. This corner of the Western Ghats, one of the richest biodiversity regions on earth, is where a large part of the Parry Agro story unfolds.

Parry Agro Industries Ltd is one of India’s leading producers of CTC, Orthodox, Organic and Green teas, and part of the Murugappa Group, one of the country’s most respected business houses. Its estates sit in some of the finest tea country India has to offer: Sheikalmudi, Murugalli, Paralai and Iyerpadi in the Anamallai Hills of Tamil Nadu, Attikunna and Carolyn in the Nilgiris and Wayanad region, and Deckiajuli in Assam, on the banks of the Brahmaputra. Together these estates cover 3,210 hectares and produce around 14 million kilograms of tea every year.

Two of these estates carry Fairtrade certification, and have done so since 2000 (FLO ID 2934). Iyerpadi and Paralai, neighbouring estates at Iyerpadi Post in Valparai Taluk of Coimbatore District, Tamil Nadu, are home to 1,400 workers, and their certification makes Parry Agro one of the earliest Fairtrade certified tea producers in India, with a full quarter century of Premium decisions behind it.

As a plantation company, Parry Agro operates under Fairtrade’s Standards for organisations that employ workers ( Fairtrade Standard for Hired Labour Plantation) . This matters, because it means the Fairtrade Premium, the extra sum paid on top of the price of tea, does not belong to the company. It belongs to the workers, and the machinery of that ownership is carefully built. Each estate has its own democratically elected Fairtrade Premium Committee, where workers discuss and propose the Premium plans for the year. Those proposals then move to a Common Fairtrade Premium Committee of 21 elected members, seven of them women, which finalises the plans. Every approved plan is ratified by the full General Assembly. Alongside it, a 27-member Works Committee, nine of them women, represents workers with management on wages, working hours, safety and grievances. Nothing is spent that the workers themselves have not proposed, debated and voted on.

The decisions are not easy ones, because the pressures are real. For workers and their families here, the defining day-to-day challenge is the steadily rising cost of living, which stretches every wage and gives every Premium rupee a job to do.

The Tea: From Two Leaves and a Bud to Four Continents

Parry Agro’s bushes grow at around 1,000 metres above sea level, and the mild hill climate allows plucking to continue throughout the year. Every harvest begins the same way it has for generations: pluckers moving along the rows, taking only the top two leaves and a bud by hand. The fresh leaves are then withered, rolled, oxidised for black tea, dried, graded and packed, all in the company’s own factories located right on the estates, so the leaf travels only a short distance between bush and factory and quality is watched at every step.

The range is unusually wide for a single producer. In CTC teas, the main grades include BOP, BOP (SM), BP and PF, which together account for close to three quarters of production. The Orthodox line runs from whole leaf grades such as TGFOP down to fannings and dust, and the company also produces green teas. The team is especially proud of its premium Orthodox black teas, known for their flavour, aroma and quality. Standards are maintained to national and international benchmarks, and alongside Fairtrade the organisation holds Rainforest Alliance, Trustea, NOP, NPOP and COR certifications.

Parry Agro tea reaches buyers in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain. Around 500,000 kilograms of Fairtrade tea is available annually, with considerable room for new Fairtrade buyers.

The Fairtrade Premium: A Ledger Written in the Letter S

Ask the estates about their Premium projects and you receive an answer that reads like a spelling lesson in care. On the estates’ own ledger, the entries begin, one after another, with the letter S: Safety, Savings, Support, Sustenance, Service, Sympathy, Sanity, Scholarship, Share. Behind each word sits a decision that 1,400 workers took together about their own money.

And there is more of that money to decide on each year. The estates received INR 51.3 lakh in Fairtrade Premium in 2024-25, rising to INR 68.1 lakh in 2025-26, a fund that grows whenever more of their tea sells on Fairtrade terms. The year before, 2023-24, had brought INR34.9 lakh. And because interest-free loans are repaid into the fund, the estates were able to put INR 92.4 lakh into Premium plans in 2024-25 alone, well above what they received that year.

Environmental investments- Caring for the land

 The estates have steadily changed the way they farm. Iyerpadi and Paralai together hold around 400 hectares of organic fields, up from just 80 hectares in 2005, where no chemicals are applied at all, only bio products. In the remaining fields, chemical use has been cut to one third of earlier levels, and the estates continue working to bring it down further using bio formulations. The Premium has also reached into workers’ kitchens and homes in ways that lighten the load on the environment: solar lights for all workers to conserve energy, and 1,200 pressure cookers that cut the fuel each family burns to put dinner on the table. Tree planting on the estates runs through a separate company initiative, the C-Cubed Project, kept deliberately outside the Premium fund so that workers’ money stays with workers’ priorities.

Social investments- Caring for people

Education has always taken first preference. From 2008 to 2022, Premium scholarships reached more than 1,300 workers’ children, a number large enough to fill several schools, and the tradition continues.

In 2025-26, another 48 children received scholarships worth INR 1.2 lakh in total, covering school fees, books and uniforms.

Students who clear their board exams receive a further push. In 2024-25, four who passed the SSLC examination and 21 who passed Plus Two each received an educational grant of INR  2,000 and INR 3,000 respectively, to cover the incidental costs of studying on.

"My children received a Fairtrade scholarship, which helped us buy school books and uniforms. It reduced our financial burden and encouraged them to continue their studies."

- Mrs. Murugeswari, Tea Plucker, Paralai Estate

Rest sheds: The working day itself has changed shape. Rest sheds built with Premium funds now offer a clean, shaded place to sit and eat lunch. Insulated food boxes and flasks keep food and water warm, and during breaks, warm tea arrives in flasks bought with the same fund. 

Insulated hot boxes: In 2024-25, 835 workers received insulated hot boxes to keep meals warm in the cool hill air, and lunch bag stands were installed in every field so that bags no longer sit on tea bushes or the ground. 

Community hall: A community hall offers families a place to celebrate weddings and functions. The hall, a converted estate building in Paralai on the Valparai to Pollachi highway, is available for INR 2,500 per event, a fraction of what a private hall would cost, and chairs and tables are being bought in 2025-26 so that families no longer need to hire them.

Workers who complete twenty years of service are sent off with a commemorative gift. Thirty-four retiring workers were honoured this way in 2024-25.

Workers who complete twenty years of service are sent off with a commemorative gift. Thirty-four retiring workers were honoured this way in 2024-25.

The fund also pays for an annual sports day, with volleyball and throwball competitions and separate events for women and children, and for sweets and a shared lunch to open each new year together.

Other entries in the ledger are quieter but just as telling. Safety shoes, socks and gloves for personal protection, which reached 1,277 workers in 2024-25 alone, 741 of them women. The Plantation Labour Act requires such gear only for workers in hazardous tasks, so leaf pluckers, who wade through wet fields where leeches bite and footing slips, had gone without until the workers chose to cover them from the Premium. Bathing soap and washing powder handed to every worker three times a year. 

A recurring deposit scheme to encourage saving, with the first instalment paid from the Premium. Medical grants that reach around 250 workers every year during health emergencies, along with support for spectacles and hearing aids, and an eye camp held in February 2025 with Aravind Eye Hospital, Coimbatore, at the Iyerpadi Estate garden hospital. LED lights for 550 families. A crèche floor newly tiled so the smallest children on the estate play in cleaner conditions. Water filters fitted in 750 individual homes. Seed money for seven physically challenged persons to start small enterprises of their own. And support for 200 families with funeral expenses, 19 of them in 2024-25 with INR 5,000 each, along with a mortuary trailer and freezer box, so that even in grief a family is not left to manage alone.

Economic investments- Caring for the future

The single most consequential entry may be the simplest one. Around 500 workers received interest-free loans totalling INR 1.2 crore to settle debts with moneylenders, who had been charging punishing rates of interest on borrowed money. For those families, the Premium did not buy an object. It bought a way out. The scheme is simple, an eligible worker borrows INR 30,000 and repays it in 20 equal instalments with no interest at all. In 2024-25 alone, 218 workers took loans totalling INR 55.9 lakh, and as each repayment flows back into the fund, it becomes the next worker’s loan. Mr. Chinnapparaj of Second Division, Iyerpadi Estate, is one of them: his loan let him meet urgent family commitments without turning to private moneylenders, sparing him interest rates his earnings could never have carried.

"The interest-free loan helped me meet my family’s urgent expenses without borrowing from private lenders. It gave me peace of mind, and I am grateful for this timely assistance."

- Mrs. Nayagam, Field Worker, First Division, Iyerpadi Estate

Key Learnings

Twenty-five years of choosing projects together is an education in itself. Sitting down each year to weigh a water filter against a scholarship, or a rest shed against a savings scheme, has made shared decision-making a habit on these estates rather than an event. That learning is now being formalised too: on 8 April 2026, 34 workers and staff attended a training session on Fairtrade International’s roles and responsibilities, deepening their understanding of the system their committees work within.

Looking Ahead

The workers’ next project takes aim at one of the oldest pressures in estate life. A marriage assistance loan plan has been drawn up for 2025-26, because weddings are precisely when families have felt forced to borrow from private lenders at high interest. The new scheme is designed so that a family can celebrate a marriage without walking into a debt trap on the way to the ceremony. On the farming side, the estates plan to expand the organic area by another 131 hectares in the near future.

For all that the Premium has built, Parry Agro is candid about its biggest constraint: only 10 to 20 percent of its produce currently sells on Fairtrade terms. Every kilogram sold outside those terms is Premium the workers never receive. Growing Fairtrade sales is therefore not an abstract commercial goal here. It is the most direct way to widen everything described above, from scholarships to savings to solar lights.

With a quarter century of certification behind it, an established decision-making culture among its workers, and 200,000 kilograms of Fairtrade tea ready for buyers today, the organisation is well placed to do exactly that. The tea is growing. The systems work. What the next chapter needs most is more buyers who choose Fairtrade.