172 THE RUBBER TREE BOOK 



work is started the better. All tools and utensils should be 

 clean and in good order the night before, ready for an early 

 start. Coolies' lines should be so distributed over the estate 

 that no coolie has to walk a long distance to his work, and there 

 should be always a muster and a roll-call on every well-managed 

 estate, at each of which the manager or some responsible assist- 

 ant should be present to check the roll. This is quite indispens- 

 able. Some managers think that if later in the day they check 

 the coolies at work in the fields this is sufficient, but this is not the 

 case. It is difficult to check the number of coolies at work at 

 tapping, although it may be possible to do so at weeding, when 

 there are gangs in the fields. To leave such work to mandoers, 

 kanganies or headmen always leads to looseness, breaches of 

 discipline, unpunctuality and want of efficiency. 



A proper system should be laid down and strictly 

 adhered to. 



A tapper should not be given an undue number of trees to 

 tap or the work is sure to suffer in quality. Besides this it 

 has been found that when a tapper gets 450 or more trees to 

 tap per day, with five or more cuts per tree, the yield per tree 

 falls off. 



On United Serdang Estates the number of trees tapped and 

 scrap collected per coolie is 200. This may seem a small 

 number, but it must be .borne in mind in making comparisons 

 that on many estates the practice is to give each tapping coolie 

 an assistant usually a woman to rinse cups and collect the 

 scrap. In this way a good tapping coolie is able to overtake 

 a much larger number of trees, as good tappers are never too 

 plentiful and are paid at a slightly higher rate ; this is a sound 

 and economical course to pursue. Then, again, in considering 

 the number of trees which a coolie can efficiently work to the 

 best advantage of the estate, it must be borne in mind that 

 the system of tapping, and the number and the lengths of the 

 parings made, have all a very direct bearing on the number of 

 the trees the tapping coolie should be expected to overtake. 

 So also has the planting distance. In ordinary circumstances, 

 a coolie in the Federated Malay States is expected to make 

 approximately one thousand cuts per day. Thus, if there are 

 three cuts per tree he can attend to about 330 trees per day, 

 whereas, if there are five cuts, 200 trees per day would be about 



