India's bitter brew

18 Sep 2008

Tea workers in India
While India flaunts its benevolence overseas, little charity is being shown to native tea laborers struggling with poverty, hunger and disease.

By Charles Bara for ISN Security Watch


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India has successfully positioned itself as a benevolent neighbor to countries in need. Not only was it one of the first countries to provide relief to disaster-struck China and Burma, it also offered US$450 million infrastructure development aid to Afghanistan in August.

But India has failed to help the most vulnerable members of its own society, among them the tea laborers of Assam and North Bengal. Since 1998 up to 4,000 tea laborers and their families have starved to death, losing their only source of income after the closure of the tea gardens. Little is being done to alleviate this problem.

The closure of the tea gardens can be attributed to a fall in tea prices, the declining productivity of the land, and hence a decline in the quality of the tea. There is also tough competition from growers Sri Lanka and Kenya. High loans and minimal investment from the landowners have also contributed to the closures.



Nevertheless, India remains the largest tea producer in the world, accounting for 31 percent of global production. According to a recent Reuters report, tea production in 2008 is expected to rise 4.79 percent to 985 million kgs.

However, according to a report on the website iGoverment, the West Bengal Trade Union Minister Aloke Chokraborty said, "The tea garden owners do not invest the profit they earn from the tea gardens into the same business or ancillary business. They take the profit and invest it in some other business at some other places."

The misery of the tea garden workers, meanwhile, is a known phenomenon. However, the majority of these laborers are easily ignored due to their Central Indian tribal affiliations. A marginal group in every respect, these workers are not a priority for anyone, including their union, which refuses to support their call for the reopening of the gardens.

These laborers were aggressively recruited to the tea gardens in the 1840s when the British sought to break China's market domination by growing tea in Assam and the Himalayan foothills in the Darjeeling area. Lured by the promise of a better life in the tea estates, the workers were forced to clear the jungles, succumbing en masse to epidemics such as malaria and kala-ajar (or "black fever"). Some were victims of tiger attacks. Between 1863 and 1966 alone, some 32,000 tea workers died.

The migration has proved devastating to the tribes as their identity is strongly tied to the ancestral lands they can no longer return to. The culture they have sought to preserve in the tea gardens is being eroded as their numbers dwindle.

Until a few years ago, there were approximately 340 tea estates in North Bengal employing some 300,000 workers. Of these, some 55 percent were women with an average of five to six people dependent on the wages of a single tea worker. The situation started to worsen in 2002. Today, the number of unemployed tea workers ranges from a very conservative 10,000 to as high as 21,000 according to a recent survey by the farm workers union, Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samiti.

The union found that workers are trying to sustain themselves on surrounding forest products and insects. In some areas, the entire population of rats and snakes has been eaten by desperate workers.

The government refuses to admit that the tally of dead tea laborers is due to starvation. Father Cherian Padiyara, who campaigns on behalf of the tea laborers said in a Businessworld article recently: "In early June the government admitted that 571 people had died in the past 15 months. It was a stunning disclosure, the first time that West Bengal had admitted there had indeed been tea garden deaths without, of course, admitting that these were due to starvation.

"It cited coronary disease, TB, high fever, septicemia, meningitis, cancer, malaria, hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver as causes of death. It is, of course, common sense that a lack of food and malnutrition lowers the body's immunity and leaves people vulnerable to a host of infections and diseases."
The same article quoted Anuradha Talwar, the West Bengal adviser to the Supreme Court, as saying that, although the state may choose to portray the deaths as disease-related, "the fact remains the workers have starved to death and many are waiting to die."

When the Chandmuni Tea Estate in West Bengal closed in 2002 to make way for urban expansion, more than 2,000 workers lost their livelihoods. Half traded their existence for token compensation. The other (noncompliant) half joined the equally miserable pavement dwellers in the city.

As they have few skills except those required to grow tea, even the best intentions are proving inadequate in helping them find an alternative source of income. In the gardens, they lived a secluded life away from towns and other villages. This remoteness made them dependent on tea estate management for everything from food and water to medicine, electricity and education.

The tribes in North Bengal have never been a high priority for the West Bengal governments. It is not that government officials ignore the issue, but funds for the victims are often siphoned off.

The percentage of aid that reaches the people affected by the closure of the tea gardens remains unknown. The lot of the tea laborers gets worse every day. As Suman Talukdar, a manager at the Child Rights and Youth (CRY) group puts it: "There is many a slip between cup and lip in the lives of those people."


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Charles Bara is a master's student at the Center for Comparative and International Studies, Zurich.


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The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).


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Publisher
International Relations and Security Network (ISN)