Kollam: Votes of nearly two lakh cashew workers spanning across various constituencies in the district, a traditional vote bank of the communist parties, will be decisive. The workers suffered most during the final lap of this government as they lost working days and faced poverty for almost eight months.
Both the LDF and the UDF who ruled the boardroom of the Kerala State Cashew Development Corporation (KSCDC) are jointly responsible for the corruption there.
Almost ten out of 11 constituencies in the district, except Chavara, have a considerable cashew workers in both public and private sector units. The model employer KSCDC itself has closed down all its 30 factories eight months back and is yet to get reopened.
“The government has no precision in running such a massive cashew industry. Lax government initiatives is the basic cause for the destruction of the industry,” P.K. Gurudasan MLA told DC. The LDF is out to cash in on this resentment, with a door-to-door campaign.
The UDF highlights the government decision to hike the wages of the workers as one of its achievements. But the KSCDC workers are nt enthused as it came of little help as the factories were closed by then.
Following the path of Cashew Corporation factories, private firms also shut down their factories citing hike in raw cashew prices. A considerable number of large scale private cashew processors has shifted to nighbouring states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, adversely affecting the indigenous cashew processing.
“The UDF government in the last five years pumped in '260 crore into the Cashew Corporation against the '170 crore during the tenure of LDF. However, this government could not protect jobs owing to massive corruption,” Kadakampally Manoj, the whistle-blower who got the CBI to probe into corruption at Cashew Corporation, told DC.
