Kodanadarama Rice Mill

If you're driving down the Main Road and see the Jaganath Filling Station, you're pretty much right there. Our rice mill is just next to it. It gets really loud once the machines start running in the morning. You can hear the hum from the street. We spend most of our time dealing with the raw paddy that comes in on the big trucks. The air always smells like toasted grain and there’s a thin layer of dust on almost everything, no matter how much we sweep. It’s hard work, especially when the humidity is high. We have a small crew and everyone knows their job. Some are at the de-husking machine and others are bagging the finished rice. We don’t have a lot of time for sitting around. The trucks need to be loaded up and sent out. Sometimes the machinery breaks down and we have to spend half the afternoon fixing a belt or a motor, which is frustrating but it’s part of the life here. People from the area know us because we’ve been at this spot for a long time. It’s a local operation, nothing like those giant factories you see in the cities. We do things the way they’ve always been done around here. It's steady work and it keeps the village moving. We just focus on the grain and making sure the mill stays running.