India attempts to revive its dwindling rubber industry
BBC By Priti Gupta
Mumbai
For more than 30 years Babu Joseph has been tending rubber trees on his small farm in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
Kerala used to be home to thousands of producers like him, who made a living extracting latex from small plantations of rubber trees, but over the last decade those numbers have dwindled.
"Rubber was once the state's prime cash crop but over the past decade, prices have plunged," he explains.
Tapping rubber trees is a labour-intensive activity. In the evening or early morning workers slice through the bark with cuts deep enough to allow the latex to run out and be collected in buckets - a process that is repeated on each tree every few days.
It requires some skill to make the incisions to the correct depth without damaging the tree.
Paying workers to do that amid falling prices has made plantations an unattractive business.
"Poor returns and high labour costs have forced many of the growers like me to give up their rubber plantations," says Mr Joseph.
