'EGG'CITEMENT EXPLAINED

How Tamil Nadu’s Namakkal got into the football World Cup

- LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

THE CLUCKING of hens fills the air as I enter a sprawling poultry farm at Kurumbapatti on the outskirts of Namakkal. As the gate opens, pipes spray sanitiser over the car. As I step out, the same thing happens to me. Drenched in sanitiser, I walk into the layer farm (where egg-laying poultry is raised for commercial purposes).

Inside, I am surrounded by hens in cages. Thousands of them in an enormous hall—in total, the facility has around 54,000 hens. In the first hall, the only space that did not have hens in cages was taken up by trays of eggs, stacked to a height of over 10 feet. The bird droppings fall on the ground, while the eggs fall in an adjacent tray. A small tray above the egg-tray is filled with granules. A huge drum with maize, jovar and soyabean in granule form moves from one end of the hall to the other and drops 110gm of granules in front of each bird. As the drum moves, the hens pull their heads into the cage. As soon as the food drop is made, the heads come out excitedly.

Namakkal has been excited since the FIFA World Cup began in Qatar last month. “Exports have gone up by 2.5 crore eggs this month, of which around 1.5 crore have gone to Qatar,” says K. Singaraj, president, Tamil Nadu Poultry Farmers Association. Before the increased demand, Namakkal used to export around two crore eggs a month to the Middle East and the Maldives.