Closed tea gardens, a trigger for trafficking

Large number of women, children have fallen victims

The closure of Duncans’ tea gardens across Dooars in North Bengal has not only caused a social crisis, the situation has also led to large-scale migration.

A large number of women and child migrants have fallen victim to trafficking, find surveys and studies. Trafficking, however, is not a new phenomenon and has been observed even earlier.

The problem of trafficking in Duncans gardens was the highlight of a letter that the Darjeeling District Legal Aid Forum wrote to the district administration. It urged the district magistrate and superintendent of police to take note of recent migration, which they believe is triggering incidents of sexual molestation and child trafficking across gardens in Dooars and Terai.

Forum general secretary Amit Sarkar claimed that with large number of people migrating to other states in search of work, as many as 1,700 children and women could have been trafficked since Duncans gardens stopped operating in May. “Although it’s hard to prove trafficking, our recent on-ground study suggests many women and children have been trafficked. We hope the administration will take serious note of the situation,” he said.

Sarkar said the forum will approach the Calcutta High Court later this month and request the court to make the administration treat their letter as a formal complaint. “We’ll present our findings to the court. We’ve video statements of tea workers and dependents regarding this,” he said.

Abhijit Mazumdar, working president of Terai Sangrami Cha Shramik Union, echoed similar concerns. He cited a report by Burdwan University professor, Biswajit Ghosh, who worked on the issue in 2011, with support from the Unicef.

In his report, Ghosh pointed out that trafficking in tea gardens dates back to 2002 and “…there has been a steady rise in the last two decades, following increased trans-border mobility of people.” Citing National Crime Records Bureau data, he observed a “…rise in the number of cases under Sections 366A for procurement of minor girls and 372 for selling of girls into prostitution of the Indian Penal Code (IPC)”. Many are trafficked to work as domestic help or in commercial sectors, he added.

Ghosh observed that the possibility of trafficking “looms large” in Bengal, given that it shares boundaries with the North-East, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand and Sikkim, besides international borders with Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Following a joint study by Unicef and Bengal government that identified some districts as being “endemic” to child trafficking, he flagged off his report based on data from 12 sick and closed tea gardens of Dooars-Terai.

Besides covering sick gardens like Indong, Red Bank and Samsing, which closed down and then reopened, he also included terminally sick gardens like Grassmore, Nayasaili and Dheklapara.