This otherwise nondescript town in western Tamil Nadu has an undisputed global presence. The fabrics that marquee fashion houses procure to brand and ship off to various parts of the world come from the mills in Tirupur, manned by thousands of workers from this small town.
Despite leaving a global footprint in the shifting sands of the fashion world, the town seems to be out of sync with modernity. This town’s brush with fame came for all the wrong reasons, when a Dalit youth was hacked to death in full public view. His crime: marrying an intermediate caste girl. Fighting against the flow of time, the town latches on to its age-old and often cruel practice of casteism.
The brutal murder of 22-year-old Dalit engineering student K Shankar in full public view highlights how deep-seated the caste based discrimination in this town is. Here, parochial forces have turned even the houses of gods into battleground for caste supremacy. Nowhere else is it more evident than at the Uchi Mahaliyamman temple in Sanuppatti, where no devotee has set their foot in five years, after caste Hindus made the precinct out of bounds for Dalits.
Tea stalls and hotels still practice the ‘two-tumbler’ system, and Dalits are discriminated against in every village, alleges S R Mathusuthanan, president of the Untouchability Eradication Front.
An agrarian town, Udumalaipettai is dominated by the Gounder and Naicker communities, with around 20 per cent of the population being Dalits. In 2011 State Assembly polls, one of the AIADMK strongmen in the Western region, ‘Pollachi’ V Jayaraman, moved from Pollachi to contest from Udumalaipettai and won by a huge margin, defeating his closest rival T Ilamparrithi of Kongu Nadu Munnetra Kazhagam.
This year, the ruling AIADMK has shifted V Jayaraman back to Pollachi and is fielding Tamil Nadu Arasu Cable TV Corporation (TACTV) chairman ‘Udumalai’ K Radhakrishnan from here.
The other crops this small town churns out include onion, tomato and bitter gourd among others. However, the vegetable farmers too are feeling the pinch of neglect. Here’s what K Lakshmi (59), a farmer from Ganapathipalayam, has to say about farming prospects, “Though we spend the whole day under the scorching sun, we seldom get enough to make this a viable business. We are dependent on rains, as the existing water supply system is inadequate. In the last three years, our profits have plummeted.”
It was in the face of such hardships that farmers started selling off their lands to wind mill companies. Tens of thousands acres of agricultural land have been sold to wind mills in the last few years. “Once the wind mill companies started mushrooming on what was hitherto dry agricultural land in Udumala, people started flocking to Tirupur in search of greener pastures. Tirupur mills now employ around 6,000 people from this region. If the government sets up a textile industrial estate here, thousands of poor people would get jobs,” feels V Ranganathan, Gudimangalam union secretary of CPM.
Untapped Potential of Coconut
Udumalaipettai is home to the second largest number of coconut plantations in the State, after Pollachi. Like their counterparts in other parts of the State, the coconut farmers too feel left out in the march to progress. The proximity of the area to Pollachi makes it one of the hotspots for coconut and coir industries, with an added prospect of good export income. Gedimedu in the constituency is famous for its coir products. A fire station based out of Gedimedu has been a long-standing demand, as coir producers often meet with losses due to fire accidents.
Did You Know?
Udumalaipettai was part of Coimbatore till the formation of Tirupur district
Rs 24,000-cr was the value of garment export from Tirupur district in the last fiscal
It is one of the few clusters, producing hundreds of mega watts of wind power
Wind power generated here caters to electricity demands of industrial units in Tirupur and Coimbatore