Bengal tea garden crisis deepens

Seeking better pay: Workers migrate to Assam, Karnataka, Kerala

The crisis in the closed tea gardens of Duncan, one of the largest manufacturers for the domestic market, could snowball into a larger setback for the tea industry in the Darjeeling-Dooars region, believe insiders.

Besides usual problems of non-payment of wages and reports of malnutrition deaths, migration of workers from the closed tea gardens to states like Assam, Karnataka and Kerala is leaving the local tea gardens without quality labour, they said.

According to insiders at Dooars tea gardens, both at Duncan’s and other estates in the region, a large number of men are migrating to neighbouring Assam to work in tea gardens there.

“Some are even moving to Karnataka and Kerala, which also have a number of tea gardens. If they are not finding work as leaf-pickers or processing factories, they are taking up work as daily wage labourers,” a veteran tea industry executive said.

He said with Duncan gardens remaining closed since late May, between 25-40 per cent of the workforce has gone missing from Dooars. Anisur Haque of Zilla Cha Bagan Worker’s Union, a tea garden union affiliated to CPI labour unit AITUC, said some of the workers’ colonies within the Duncan gardens have hardly any men left.

“Although the government is arranging for work under NREGA, this mostly involves lifting boulders that need to be loaded and unloaded along the banks of the many rivers to prevent erosion. The women who picked leaves are finding it difficult to take up such work,” he said.

Seconding Haque’s observation, Sangita Oraon, a permanent worker at Bagrakote, one of the 13 closed Duncan gardens, said she is currently working as a temporary leaf-picker at non-Duncan gardens for Rs 100 a day with no incentives.

“At our own garden, we were paid Rs 3 for every additional kilo above the daily target of 24 kg. Now even if we’re picking 40-50 kg a day, we’re still being paid Rs 100,” she said.

Even though her husband Praveen, a temporary worker at Bagrakote, is working at a tea garden in Upper Assam, they are not earning enough to make the ends meet.

The scene is no different at the Pradhan household in the Nepalese quarters at Bagrakote. For 21-year-old Dipendra, working as a security guard in a Gangtok hotel has become the sole point of subsistence. His father Rajan, who died of tuberculosis and a damaged liver on October 31, was a temporary worker and is being counted among the reported 26 malnutrition deaths.

His mother Tara, a permanent worker at Bagrakote, has found a temporary leaf-picking work in Assam.

The industry veteran admitted that other tea gardens are taking advantage of the situation and employing Duncan staff members as temporary workers at wages much lower than the prescribed rate and without other benefits.