Coonoor (Tamil Nadu), Sep 15 - The absence of chief guest, Union Labour and Employment Minister Mallikarjun Kharge, and top commerce ministry officials has dampened spirits of participants at the 116th annual conference of coffee, tea, spices and rubber planters here.

'The minister could not come as his flight from Bangalore to Coimbatore (about 75 km from here) got delayed by over two hours,' a senior official of the sector's trade body, United Planters' of Southern India (UPASI), told IANS here.

Though Kharge was at the Bangalore airport on time, he could not board the Coimbatore flight as the aircraft, arriving from Kochi, was two hours behind schedule.

Earlier, the unofficial reason given for Kharge's absence was that he had gone to Mysore with Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who inaugurated the second unit of global education centre of IT bellwether Infosys Technologies Ltd at its campus outside the city.

The absence of Kharge, who hails from the coffee-growing state of Karnataka, as well as the absence of chairmen of the four plantation boards at the conference forced UPASI outgoing president D.