By Fakir Balaji,IANS,
Coonoor (Tamil Nadu) : The 116th annual conference of coffee, tea, spices and rubber planters here Tuesday got short shrift when chief guest Union Labour and Employment Minister Mallikarjun Kharge failed to turn up, disappointing the participants.
“The minister could not come as his flight from Bangalore to Coimbatore (about 75 km from here) got delayed by over two hours,” a senior official of the sector’s trade body United Planters’ of Southern India (UPASI) told IANS here.
Though Kharge was at the Bangalore airport on time, he could not board the Coimbatore flight as the aircraft, arriving from Kochi, was two hours behind schedule.
Earlier, the unofficial reason given for Kharge’s absence was that he had gone to Mysore with Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who inaugurated the second unit of global education centre of IT bellwether Infosys Technologies Ltd at its campus outside the city.
The absence of Kharge, who hails from the coffee-growing state of Karnataka, and is a first time union minister, was a dampener as the organisers (UPASI) had to scout for a chief guest in short time.
The absence of chairmen of the four plantation boards at the conference this time forced UPASI outgoing president D.P. Maheshwari to request Tea Board deputy chairperson Roshini Sen, who was present on the occasion, to officiate for the minister at short notice.
Coincidentally, none of the mandarins from Udyog Bhavan, the seat of the union commerce ministry in New Delhi, made it to Coonoor this time, indicating the ‘importance’ given to the concerns of planters.
Conventionally, the union commerce minister or his deputy is the chief guest at the century-old UPASI annual conferences. As the present minister (Anand Sharma) is away in Geneva for the WTO negotiations on the Doha Round and his deputy Jyotiraditya Scindia is pre-occupied, Kharge was invited to preside this year.
“This is not the first time when the union commerce or other central/state ministers failed to turn up for our annual meeting, which is the only important event of the year. Even chairmen of plantation boards skip the meet for some reason,” a coffee planter from Karnataka lamented.