ISBN: - 978-93-88936-09-5 Only 45per cent of tappers use head light for tapping. This facility is enjoyed by those who tap trees in estate holdings. The average time taken for tapping and allied works by a tapper is estimated separately. An average time of 3.25 hours is taken for tapping; 1.75 hours is taken for collection of latex and 0.50 hours is taken for rolling. Almost in all cases the drying and smoking of sheets are done by the owner of the land himself. Rubber plantations had its beginning in India during the first decade of the last century. Rubber is one of the important cash crops in the district. Kanyakumari accounts for 95 per cent of area under rubber in Tamil Nadu. In this district rubber plantations are located in the northern part of the three taluks namely Kalkulam, Vilavancode and Thovalai. It has given ample employment opportunity. 150 sample respondents (Tappers) were chosen from Kanyakumari district which include 70 tappers from Kalkulam taluk, 50 tappers from Vilavancode and the remaining 30 tappers from Thovalai taluk for the study. A good tapper can tap a tree every 20 seconds on a standard halfspiral system and a common daily, ‘task’ size is between 450 and 650 trees. Trees are usually tapped on alternate days although there are many variations in timing, length and number of cuts. The trees will drip latex for about four hours. When the flow is stopped latex coagulates naturally on the tapping cut thus blocking the latex tubes in the bark. Tappers usually rest and have a meal after finishing their tapping work. Then they start collecting the latex at about midday. Some trees will continue to drip after the collection and this leads to a small amount of cup lump which is collected at the next tapping. The latex that coagulates on the cut is also collected as tree lace. Tree lace and cup lump together account for 10-20 per cent of the day rubber produced. Latex is generally processed into either latex concentrate for manufacture of dipped goods or it can be coagulated under controlled, clean conditions using formic acid. The coagulated latex can then be processed into the higher grade technically specified block rubbers such as TSR 3L or TSRCV or used to produce ribbed smoke sheet grades. Naturally coagulated rubber is used in the manufacture of TSR 10 and TSR 20 grade rubbers. 4.5 OPERATIONAL TERMS IN TAPPING 4 .5 (A) Bark An inner layer of soft bast, an intermediate layer of hard bast, and an outer protective layer of cork cells can be distinguished in the bark of the rubber tree. Latex vessels are concentrated in the soft bast, arranged in a series of concentric rings of interconnecting vessels. The number, dimension and the distribution of latex vessels and the proportion of hard bark show much variation from tree to tree in seedling population. 4 .5 (B) Marking, slope and direction of tapping cut The tapping cut of budded trees should have a slope of about 30˚ to the horizontal. For seedling trees, the cut need to have a slope of only about 25˚, since the bark is fairly thick. A very 103
111 Publizr Home