For decades, Asia's largest lac plantation employed Dalit and tribal women in Kundri village, Palamu district — a 421-acre natural forest w...

For decades, Asia's largest lac plantation employed Dalit and tribal women in Kundri village, Palamu district — a 421-acre natural forest where palash trees grow lac resin used in medicine capsules, sweets, shoe polish, and government seals. In 2018, after workers delivered a full season's harvest, the payments stopped. The Forest Department said it had paid the cooperative; the cooperative said the Forest Department had not paid. The women, most of them Dalit, were caught between two institutions disputing a ledger while holding four to six months of unpaid labour. The 2020 lockdown shut the plantation entirely, breaking the brood-lac supply chain for four districts and triggering illegal tree-cutting throughout the forest. The government launched a revival project in 2023, working with 1,074 households and pruning 21,000 trees. A government official, speaking anonymously, reports that Rs 6 lakh worth of newly produced lac has already been stolen since the revival began. The Rs 4 lakh from 2018 remains outstanding. Jharkhand produces over 50 percent of India's lac, supporting more than four lakh rural families. The state's chosen description for Kundri — Asia's largest — predates all of this.