To find the richest man in Valparai, one has to take the winding town road up to the government hospital. There, on 15,260 sq ft of land, is a sprawling bungalow-the town's biggest. Inside the double-storeyed house, which has a road leading up to its first floor porch for motorists to drop off visitors, lives Gopalswamy Mudaliar. More than 60 years ago, he came to Valparai as a village muncif, but went on to acquire 950 acres of plantation land in its hills. Today, Mudaliar is 91 and has everything that a rich man, even in a small town, could possibly want, including a Mercedes-Benz. Although Mudaliar has other rich planters for company (the 150-acre Valparai town ranked as the fourth richest city in terms of per capita income in R.K. Swamy's recent survey of 784 towns), you can tell that things aren't the same around here.

The plantation business-specifically tea, since coffee and cardamom account for a small part of it-has fallen on hard times. Sure, there is Hindustan Lever, Tata Tea, L.N. Bangur's Peria Karamalai Estates, Nusli Wadia's Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, and B.K. Birla's Jay Shree Tea. But since 2000, both tea prices and nature have worked against the green Valparai hills, where one R.J. Lowry first set up the Carnatic Coffee Company in 1864. Prices have plunged from Rs 70 a kilo in 1998 to about Rs 42 currently. Rains, which used to drench Valparai nine to 10 months in a year, have reduced to a drizzle lasting six months (tea needs alternating bouts of rain and sunshine to thrive).

In fact, when this correspondent visited the town's Anamalai Hills, the tea estates were trying to recover from their worst drought of 140 days. Therefore, instead of plucking tea leaves, the skeletal staff of plantation workers was busy fighting a pest attack. "With our high costs, it is getting harder to maintain the estates," says D.P. Maheshwari, President, Anamalai Planters Association. Adds Selvi Vijayarajan, Chairman of the Valparai panchayat: "If the tea industry dies, then Valparai dies."

Umesh Arora (hand on hip) and S.J. Subodh Sharma, managers at B.K. Birla's Jay Shree Tea, run the most productive tea estate in Valparai

From Tea To Tourism

The once-booming plantation economy may already be dying. Worker wages are down to a net of Rs 72 per day, (Maheshwari, who is also President of Jay Shree Tea, says that it still makes them the highest-paid plantation workers in the country), most of them are in debt because in the one year when wage negotiations were happening between April 2002 and April 2003 and employers were only paying an advance salary of Rs 50, the workers borrowed from usurious money lenders, and many of them actually left Valparai to find work in places such as Tirupur. According to the local merchants' association, a bonus-cum-arrear of about Rs 8 crore was paid out to some 28,000 workers last year, but it hasn't resulted in higher sales in shops. Reason: The money was used to settle most of the old debts. Says R. Alagiri, Valparai's only cable operator: "I think every worker family here will still have an average of Rs 5,000 in debt."

With the tea industry in the doldrums, the panchayat-still one of the richest in the state, with an annual income of Rs 3 crore-is contemplating a makeover of Valparai into a green resort. Not without reason. Located 3,500 feet above sea level in the Anamalai Hills, Valparai is actually Tamil Nadu's best kept tourism secret. Although it gets about 1,50,000 visitors each year, there is no organised tourist industry here. There are several boarding lodges, but only one hotel, no restaurant of note, and no movie theatre. All that makes Valparai, which officially is not even a hill resort, a great destination for those in search of a quiet holiday.

At the same time, it has reasonably good infrastructure to make getting about easy. A hundred-odd private taxis and 180 auto rickshaws ply the town and about, besides which there are two internet browsing centres. Getting to Valparai is an experience in itself, too. The picturesque ghat has some 40 hairpin bends that coil round the lush green hills, and wild flowers dot the ride up. The town itself is sandwiched between tea plantations and the reserve forests, providing little scope for builders to spoil its charm.

Thanks to its pervasive greenery, Valparai teems with wild animals. Not infrequently, panthers are seen in bungalow gardens, prowling for domestic fowls, cattle or dogs. Wild elephants also often come down in herds to the bungalows, and raid rice barns and other storage granaries with such monotonous frequency that they are accepted as part of the inhabitants' everyday life. Not that the pachyderms don't cause damage. Bangur's P.K. Estates decided to stop growing cardamom because the elephants regularly destroyed the crop.

H.C. Malpani of P.K. Estates site out in the garden of his bungalow with wife (right) and daughter for a cup of afternoon tea. A river runs along behind the garden wall

Although the whole of Valparai has a population of 94,000, the main town itself has only 25,000 residents. Add the promise of wild encounters to Valparai's unspoilt charms, not to mention the 45 waterfalls and five dams that come under the special panchayat, and you have the winning formula for a popular tourist resort. According to K. Saleem, an executive officer of the panchayat, a proposal to build a boating lake is awaiting the state government's approval. Possibly in anticipation of a tourist boom, Shaji George, the owner of Valparai's only hotel, is busy adding rooms, even though he grumbles about poor occupancy.

Those Were The Days

Not too long ago, Valparai was a prosperous place for tea workers. They made Rs 76 a day, and at least two members of a family found work with the estates, totting up more than Rs 4,000 a month. The estate provided (and still provides) free housing, medical care, education (upto Class 8), day care and meals for children, and scholarships for higher education.

The more progressive estates also introduced compulsory savings in post office schemes, group life insurance policies, and provided bank guarantees for loans to buy consumer durables. Bonuses were fixed at 20 per cent of annual wages, well above industry norms. "In those days, the workers used to hire a taxi for Rs 1,000 to go to Coimbatore just to watch a movie in a theatre," recalls Alagiri, the local cable operator.

Thrift, then, was not the workers' strong point. A lot of them would buy jewellery with their meagre incomes, but end up pawning them when hard up. At one time, there were some 300 pawn brokers in Valparai, but their number is down to 180-no doubt a reflection of the town's changing fortunes. And one of those who made the most of it when the times were good is A.V. Vallikannu, who owns a petrol pump, jewellery shops, a pharmacy, and a pawn shop, among others. The story goes that 40 years ago, Vallikannu came to this place as a cook-cum-assistant to a jeweller. His employer also used him as a collection agent. But his fortunes took a turn for the better when his employer, enriched by the pawn-broking business, left for the plains to start a finance company. Vallikannu took over and then, like they say, there was no looking back.

Plantation owners, despite their above-average productivity (3,500 kg per acre versus national average of 1,700 kg per acre), haven't been as lucky. Most of them, as certifies H.C. Malpani, Group Manager of P.K. Estates and a 23-year Valparai veteran, are simply coping. "Given a decent (price to) exit, many planters would be willing to sell out," says Malpani. But to those who've spent the better part of their lives in Valparai, hope doesn't die easy. For instance, Malpani's son, who is studying engineering, wants to come back and run the plantation. But even Malpani knows that Valparai's best hope in the long run is not his son, but the tourist.