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| Kamaraj, Sakthi, Pollachi |
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For the college student who used to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning, milk the cows at home and supply the milk to shops till it was time for college, hard work was a thing well ingrained in his blood. Hence skipping the lunch hour for milk distribution and having his lunch in the evening after classes too did not overcome his zealous nature. Kamaraj, who built his life on the foundations of will power and toil, is today at the helms of a coconut based business group with multi-crore turnover.
Son of ordinary parents running dairy farm in Thrissur, he went to Saudi Arabia after completing his degree course. After 6 months in the desert sands, he came back – not to Thrissur but to Pollachi. Kamaraj started a small scale unit supplying coir fibre to a firm producing foam beds.
Seeing the sterling qualities in the young man, the chief of the bed-making unit gifted him with an old machine for producing curled fibre, the processed coir fibre. That was the beginning of Kamaraj’s rise. From then he did not supply mere fibre but the processed curled fibre. From then he went on to production of foam beds, activated carbon, ice cream cup, coir fibre medium for plants etc, all the products being derived from coconut trees.
Coir fibre as a medium for plants has a good demand in US and European countries for planting bonsais and other decorative plants. His factory produces 3 tonnes of this products daily. Activated carbon, another product from his stables, has good demand in electronics, tyre and pharmaceutical industries. The man who exported 2 lakh coconut shell based ice cream bowls for the Barcelonia Olympics, is showing the way how to use our meek raw materials for the needs of the modern world.
Courtesy: Staff Reporter (text), Bino Thomas (photo), Karshakasree, May 1997
Contributed by: Administrator
