Lok Sabha elections 2024: Plight of tea garden workers brews in North Bengal, but parties pay little attention

Darjeeling/Alipurduars: Amidst the electioneering in the hills and foothills, little is being talked about the plight of over five lakh tea garden workers who have been fighting for minimum wages for years without success even as the tea industry struggle in the face of multiple domestic challenges and loss of export market.

Last week, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh addressed a rally in the middle of a tea-garden but didn’t utter a word on the tea industry. The grievances of the workers didn’t find a place in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speeches in the Dooars regions and there are not many takers for the Trinamool Congress’s welfare schemes for tea garden workers because of the inherent flaws in the schemes.

North Bengal houses 302 traditional tea gardens – 87 in Darjeeling hills – besides hundreds of new “project gardens” in which farm lands traditionally used to cultivate pineapple and rice have been converted into tea estates for a quick buck without caring for the statutory rights of workers employed in such gardens.

“Since 2014, we have had 19 rounds of tripartite talks involving workers, tea garden owners and the government on the minimum wage demand. But nothing happened,” said Suraj Subba, a tea garden union leader from Gorkha Janmukti Morcha.

Subba, a member of the minimum wage advisory advisory committee formed by the West Bengal government, said tea garden workers had been migrating to other cities in search of jobs with higher earnings.

It’s not that the wage remained static in all these years. The daily wage of a tea garden worker has gone up to Rs 250 per day from about Rs 150 a decade ago. They also receive provident fund, gratuity, bonus, medical benefits and housing as per statutory obligations.

“But just about 35 per cent of tea garden owners in Darjeeling pay the PF and gratuity in time. There are big defaulters, who have not deposited crores in PF accounts,” Subba said, while recognising challenges like cheap imports from Nepal.

The Darjeeling Tea Association has been appealing to the Union government to stop tea imports from Nepal to protect the domestic growers. “The production cost of one kg of Darjeeling tea is Rs 790 per kg while Nepal teas cost Rs 170-180 per kg,” said Sandeep Mukherjee, principal advisor, Darjeeling Tea Association.

The import flourished during the 2017 Gorkhaland agitation when the tea gardens were closed for nearly three months. In 2022, domestic production at Darjeeling was 6.60 million kg while 17.36 million kg was imported from Nepal. A year later, the domestic production has further dipped to 6.1 million kg.

“Darjeeling tea is India’s first GI (geographical indicator) product. The government needs to protect the domestic industry and promote it to open up new export markets. We lost our biggest export market in the USSR since the disintegration,” said Mukherjee.

Chinmay Dhar, manager of Majher Dabri tea estate near Alipurduar said the government must fix a floor level price for the tea industry as production growth in unregulated project gardens was crippling the traditional industry.

“The big brands pick up poor quality teas from such gardens and sell them at a premium. Such gardens pay the workers anything between Rs 120-150 per day and don’t fulfil the statutory obligations under the Plantations Labour Act of 1951,” said Dhar.

The gardens also battle the consequences of climate change affecting the productivity of the gardens. “Annual rainfall is short by 24 per cent. It has also become erratic. Many times the first flush starts amidst a drought like situation,” said Mukherjee.