Connections
India, Asia
Cecilia Amma, 50, harvests tea leaves at a private tea estate in Kotagiri, Nilgiris, a district in India’s southern Tamil Nadu state. “We are the last of the tea pluckers,” Amma says, noting that her community’s children are in school to pursue professional careers. Amma says she lived in Sri Lanka before she was repatriated to India under the Sirima-Shastri pact, a 1964 agreement between Sri Lanka and India that granted Indian citizenship to people of Indian descent in Sri Lanka.
