U Shwe Win, Chairman of Township Peace and Development Council of Falam Township issued an order to the people to clean up bushes in the state owned tea plantation on June 14.

The order also added that people failing to be present in the mass labour for cleaning up will be fined Kyat 1,000 per day. The deadline to finish the job is July.

The people including government employees residing in Pathangkhan, Cinmual, Tlanglo and Farthawk wards of Falam Town were told to clean the bushes in the tea gardens spread over an area of 100 acres.

"From the very inception of the plantation, we had sowed the seeds and cleaned the shrubs. The people silently do what is asked of them as they dare not defy the order," a local in Falam Town said.

Some of the employees were said to have paid the sum the regime demanded for being absent.

A school teacher in Falam Town also said, "I would rather give them money than work in the plantation as I have to attend school regularly".

It is learnt that only one–third of the government employees among about 1,000 working in offices in Falam Town are likely to go to the tea plantation for the clean up drive, a school teacher added.

According to a government report in early 2008, tea planted in Chin state had covered around 14,188 acres in 2007 after the regime introduced its tea plantation project in Chin state in 2001.

A forest fire broke out in Falam Town last year and destroyed around one hundred acres of 2,242 acres of tea gardens nurtured by forced labor in Falam Township. But there is no report of re-cultivation of tea in the damaged plantation. – Khonumthung.