Tea worker starvation deaths

Kalavati Barai of Raipur Tea Estate in Jalpaiguri has been watching the consistent deterioration of her family of six over the past four years. In March this year, her husband succumbed to severe anaemia and related complications. “I couldn’t feed him, so he died,” she states simply. Since the tea garden was abandoned by its owners in 2003, they have been subsisting largely on one meal of rice a day. Kalavati’s youngest son, 13-year-old Kartik, is now severely ill but she can’t afford his medicines. “He hasn’t been to school for three years now. The doctor says his kidney is damaged. What do I give him? I have nothing.” There are several others like her who are suffering because of closure of 14 tea gardens in North Bengal in 2003-04.

Most of the gardens closed after production fell and profits plummeted due to low yields from ageing tea bushes. Several gardens were abandoned by their owners, leaving behind large debts and dues of Rs 18. 69 crore in workers’ provident funds. More than 17,000 workers at these tea estates have been struggling; there are no other means of livelihood. An estimated 1,000 people—workers and family members—have died of malnutrition and related diseases since 2003 in the Dooars region.

The governor of the state, Gopal Gandhi, expressed shock four months ago at the dire situation of tea estate workers. The media in the state has regularly covered the workers’ plight, leading to red faces in the Left Front government of West Bengal as well as the Centre. The much-awaited response came on July 7 from the Tea Board of India, the Union ministry of commerce’s regulatory body on tea trade: an ultimatum to the 14 estate owners to reopen the plantations within a month, failing which the Centre would take over their estates and hand them over to new owners. The estate owners have until mid-August to respond to this ultimatum. Talks between government and tea industry officials also produced a package of Rs 119 crore to revive the tea industry. A senior tea board official said the package in June 2007, includes:

• a five-year moratorium on damages for defaulting on provident fund and gratuity payments
• waiver of all loans from the tea board and soft loans for five or six year terms to help with replantation
• rejuvenation of old tea bushes

Surviving on rats
“No other organised sector has seen so many deaths from chronic malnutrition before,” says Anuradha Talwar of the West Bengal Network for Right to Food and Work, which has estimated the death count of 1,000 in its study. It found workers were eating wild grass, leaves and rats to survive. A survey by Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samiti, a farm workers’ union, found the workers surviving on as little as 200 calories per day, compared to 1,000-2,900 calories before the estates closed down. An average adult is believed to require at least 850 calories per day.

The state government denies that food scarcity is responsible for the deaths; it did acknowledge in June that 571 people had died at the gardens between January 2006 and March 2007. The state health department had a long cause list for the deaths. It included tuberculosis, meningitis, cancer, malaria, hepatitis and septicaemia. It did not mention what is common knowledge: lack of nutrition makes the sick more vulnerable. Forty-six of those who died were children below the age of 10, and 465 died at home, unable to afford trips to a healthcare facility.

The media outcry led to the administration and several ngos distributing food and medicines, and conducting health camps in badly hit estates like Ramjhora and Bharnobari in Siliguri. Debashis Chakrobarty of Siliguri Welfare Organisation, a voluntary health service outfit, said the efforts are vastly inadequate.

In April, the state had announced a special interim grant of Rs 16 crore for the closed gardens as a stopgap solution while negotiations were going on. Media reports claimed little of this has reached the workers.

Most of the affected gardens are far from towns and villages, limiting employment options and healthcare services for the unskilled workers. Public transport to towns is infrequent and expensive—it costs Rs 60 for a 30-km bus trip to Jalpaiguri town from Raipur. The Plantation Labour Act of 1951 makes it the estate owners’ responsibility to provide the workers basic needs—food, education, healthcare. With the tea estates becoming unprofitable after the late 1990s, the owners abandoned their responsibility.

Ownership crises
Most estates are now run by ad hoc management committees set up by local trade unions. “We depend entirely on nature now,” says Kajal Ghosh, a former supervisor at Raipur tea estate, now helping out the committee. “December-March is the lean period when plucking is stopped, to start again in April. Things are a little better during the monsoon, and we can pay regular wages.”

The committees lack the expertise to run the processing plants, which can’t run anyway after the water and power connections were cut due to unpaid dues. So, the picked tea leaves are sold to the processing factories that have cropped up in the region. The day’s earnings are divided up among the workers. With no resources to spend on protection of the tea bushes, output is low. Workers pick about 3-4 kg of leaves per person per day, which was 10-12 kg earlier. The daily earnings vary from Rs 5-10 to nothing a day. Then, there are allegations against the committees, too. At the Kalchini Tea Estate in Jalpaiguri, the committee members have been accused of embezzling funds.

Compromised from all sides, workers are forced to sell household items, or crush stones in nearby riverbeds for daily wages. There are also occasional jobs of digging drains and widening roads under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (nrega). Officials claim the state government is carrying out several work-for-food schemes and distributing food for the children and the aged.

But the effectiveness of these schemes is questioned. A National Legal Services Authority report submitted to the prime minister and the chief justice says there is “rank mismanagement in distribution of job cards, pensions and the 100-day work scheme”. It says the workers’ are going hungry because of unemployment, absence of alternative income opportunities and limited access to social justice schemes.

Estate employees such as Ghosh have repeatedly suggested nrega funds would be better utilised to on running the gardens instead of peripheral development work. At Dehklapara Tea Estate near the Indo-Bhutanese border, also closed since 2003, an emaciated Rita Sonal has been given a job under nrega: cutting hard mud with a spade and loading it on to trucks. Though glad to have a job, Sonal has a hard time. “We don’t have strength left in our bodies for this kind of heavy work,” she says.

A troubled brew
The first wave of tea garden closures in North Bengal began in the late 1990s after managements shut down operations citing poor economic viability. There are an estimated 160 tea plantations in North Bengal, which account for about 30 per cent of India’s annual tea production of about 823 million kg. India is the world’s largest tea producer, but industry insiders say its us $1.5 billion a year tea business has been suffering over the past decade following a crash in tea auction prices and a slump in leaf exports.

According to a status paper by the Tea Association of India, declining productivity, rising input costs, low level of labour output and age profile of tea bushes contributed most to the decline of the industry. The North Bengal gardens, whose leaves were once considered among the best in the country, have been the worst hit.

Some garden owners, like Robin Pal of the Redbank group in Jalpaiguri, blame trade unions for the crisis, saying they made impossible demands regarding wages and benefits at a time when business was suffering. But others, like Sanjay Bansal of the Ambootia group point to other reasons: bad management practices, owners siphoning off money instead of investing it in the gardens, overuse of pesticides and indisciplined workers.

The other cause for decline is the proliferation of small growers and ‘bought leaf’ factories since the 1980s, says Naba Dutta of Nagrik Mancha, a Kolkata-based citizen’s group that investigates labour issues. According to government records, there are 6,000 small tea growers in Bengal (though the United Forum of Small Tea Growers’ Association pegs it at 15,000). These gardens, industry watchers say, has done more harm than good for the local tea business. They are run by businessmen interested only in quick profits, who don’t know the specifics of tea growing and don’t concern themselves much with quality control. As a result, the industry’s reputation has suffered. Both Dutta and Bansal believe the situation can be corrected by recognising that the bought leaf sector is the nemesis of the tea industry, work on making the soil healthy again, and by treating workers as assets.

Dutta goes a step further and insists that though there’s a general idea that the entire tea industry in the country is ailing, nothing could be further from the truth. “A simple example – the price of tea hasn’t reduced in the domestic market,” he says. “Tea garden owners say that the market is fallen, consumption is decreasing, that young generation is drinking cold drinks, but a recent Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, study has projected total domestic consumption of tea has increased from 737.13 million kg in 2006 to 789.49 million kg in 2007,” he says. The study projects consumption will increase further to 867 million kg by 2009. Also, only 30 per cent of tea produced comes to auction houses on which accounting of a garden’s profit is measured, so can never really know the actual profit/loss margin, he says. Dutta believes the current crisis developed because many garden owners are using their estates to take out huge loans and invest the money in other businesses rather than in the upkeep of the gardens and the workforce. Nagrik Mancha and several civil and labour rights’ groups are conducting an independent study into the “real cause” of the garden closures.

Ethnicity of the workers has also been a crucial reason why this abysmal situation has been allowed to drag on for so long, human rights activists allege. More than 85 per cent of the workers are tribals—fourth generation immigrants of migrants brought in by the British from Jharkhand, Bihar and Chhattisgarh or low-caste refugees from Bangladesh’s Jassore, Khulna and Barishal regions. A largely marginalised group, they lack the education or organisation to fight for their rights. Even when the estates are open, their daily cash wage is about Rs 48 and their standard of living is pathetically low. The trade unions, that purport to fight for their rights, have been so busy fighting among themselves and with the management, that they’ve paid scant attention to ensuring relief measures for workers at the closed gardens.

But anger at the injustice done to them is slowly building up among workers.

At Dehklapara Tea Estate, Dharamveer Bikuda, a young worker, threatens that if no action is taken soon, he and his friends will start blocking roads and robbing rich people driving by in cars. “We can’t go hungry for ever,” he says.

By Maureen Nandini Mitra
Source: Down To Earth