DINDIGUL: On the banks of the Vaigai near Anaipatti, a child once watched the water grow thinner year after year, like a promise slowly being withdrawn. Trees planted in hope were hacked down in greed, hills were bitten into by quarries, and children quietly disappeared from their homes. The land and its people were being traded away, debt by debt.
It was in this landscape that S Annadurai, a social activist from Dindigul, found his life’s work. With over 25 years of social activism, he has established a school for the Paliyar tribes in Kodaikanal, rescued more than 50 child labourers in Nilakottai, and confronted illegal stone and sand mining in the district.
“My father, Sadamayan, was a farmer in Anaipatti in Nilakottai district, while my mother Santhanam was a homemaker. I grew up in a family with a brother and a sister in Anaipatti. During school days, my attention turned to the Vaigai river, which flowed near our village. Over time, the river’s width had begun to shrink, and this deeply disturbed me,” Annadurai recalls.
As the river narrowed, his questions widened. “The elders in my village and my schoolmates sparked my interest in environmental and ecological safety,” he explains. “Together with my friends, I started planting trees in vacant areas of our village. But many of these trees were cut down by influential people with strong political ties. That reality gradually shaped my thinking.”
If the Vaigai taught him to see, a week-long camp taught him where to look. His shift towards tribal welfare activism began in 1999, when he attended a camp organised by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB). There, he met local researcher Dr Dakshinamoorthy.
“Later, Dr Dakshinamoorthy sought my help to visit Paliyar tribes in Sirumalai for a research paper, where locals revealed that wealthy individuals had trapped tribal groups as bonded farm labourers.
“I went to the area discreetly and offered help,” he says. “I gave them my mobile number. One day, I received a call saying that the landlords had brutally assaulted them. I immediately went there with a team of social workers and we managed to rescue around 32 tribal workers.”
Bonded labour, Annadurai realised, did not end with adults on farms. “A few months later, I started focusing on child rights and education,” he says. “I have been able to rescue more than 50 children from Nilakottai who were engaged as labourers.”
It began with children vanishing from local villages. One disappearance led him to Chellampatti, where a single mother explained that a financier had taken her son to work in an Andhra Pradesh “murukku” factory. She had borrowed Rs 20,000 and could not repay it. Her son had not returned home for three years. Annadurai said that he filed a complaint at a police station and provided them with the address of the factory. In turn, the Andhra Pradesh police traced the boy and brought him back home.
Annadurai’s activism focuses on reshaping futures, notably through a school near Kodaikanal. In 2011, he visited the isolated, malnourished Paliyar families in Pallangi after six children died within weeks. Discovering 32 tribal children had never attended school—the nearest being 13 kilometres away—he raised Rs 5 lakh from friends and relatives to build a local classroom. To overcome initial family hesitation and build trust, Annadurai distributed hens and goats. Supported by local teacher Pandiyammal, who volunteered to conduct classes, the school successfully opened doors for the community. In 2018, the school education department took over the administration of the school. Two more teachers were appointed, and additional classrooms and toilets were built.
For Annadurai, the river that disrupted his childhood still flows through his work, now choked by quarrying and mining dust. Following years of protest against illegal sand mining by local elites in Nilakottai, he successfully pushed authorities to increase surveillance and seize dozens of vehicles.
Annadurai strongly advocates for social activism to be included as a subject in the school curriculum. To him, activism should not be an accident that happens when someone stumbles upon injustice. It should be a taught, nurtured skill. His own path suggests what might be possible if more students learn what he learnt the hard way: that the distance between witnessing and intervening is just one decision.