Of late, making of ‘murukku,’ the delicious snack being made in Manapparai, has been witnessing a shift towards mechanisation and online marketing.
Demand for the produce has always been growing. Hundreds of labourers are involved in making this snack in various tiny and medium stalls all over the town. Most of them have inherited the trade from their forefathers. Mechanisation has become inevitable as the traders want to step up production without diluting the quality or compromising the taste. “Instead of the conventional grinding and mixing of ingredients, we adopt bigger grinders for preparing the rice flour - the only major raw material used for the produce,” say traders.
According to an estimate, there are 150 small and medium units in the town involved in preparing the snack.
Each shop has a minimum of six labourers while the major shops has about a dozen men and women workers. Most traders are not able to tell their daily or weekly production, although they could confirm that they prepare it for about 10 hours from 7 a.m.
The workers gather around two cauldrons while a couple of labourers squeeze the flour into white coils before sliding them into hot oil.
The ‘murukku’ is drained into a colander before shifting it into a bamboo basket. It is immediately packed . Traders attribute the distinctive flavour of the snack to the quality of water in Manapparai.
The trade was confined to interior and cramped shops deep in the town all these years.
But the four-laning of the Tiruchi - Dindigul National Highway has changed the face of the trade with a large number of outlets having come up all along the highway.
In a majority cases, an entire family is involved in the trade. Marc Grace, a woman, who looks after the accounts of her shop, says that she had inherited the trade from her father-in-law Chinnappan. The process looks deceptively easy but involves hard labour.
Published - November 04, 2016 12:00 am IST
