Guest Post by Harsh Mander
[The sudden withdrawal by some tea plantation managements in North Bengal of not just regular employment, but also all a series of life-enabling services is proving to be nothing short of catastrophic for workers.]
A largely invisible, grim, humanitarian crisis, of
mounting hunger, looms over several thousand North Bengal tea garden workers.
Duncans, a leading tea company with 15 plantations in Darjeeling and the
Himalayan foothills, has plunged its workers into a precarious state of illegal
limbo. It has neither formally closed its gardens nor is it running operations
normally, with devastating consequences for the survival and future of around
15,000 workers and their families.
The company began tea operations
in India in 1857, clearing large swathes of dense forests in North Bengal to
establish its extensive tea plantations. With other British plantation
companies, it transported industrious tribal people from Chota Nagpur and
Santal Parganas as indentured, near-slave labour. After Independence, ownership
of these companies gradually passed into Indian hands. Although nominally free
now, workers continued to work in near-colonial conditions. The dependence and
submissiveness of the workers was partly secured by paying part-wages in kind,
as food rations, housing and health services. Until recently, most tea worker households
were not even issued Public Distribution System (PDS) ration cards. Instead,
State governments supplied PDS grain to companies to issue to workers.
In these conditions, if tea garden managements suddenly
withdraw these supplies, workers are left singularly defenceless and
precarious. The first such crisis was thrust upon workers of 30 tea gardens in
North Bengal in 2003-04, when they were illegally closed and abandoned
overnight by owners who no longer found them to be commercially viable. Instead
of first securing the interests of the workers and gardens, they simply
disappeared. On my visits to the gardens at that time, I found several worker
households facing conditions of actual starvation.
A similar situation has arisen today with the illegal
semi-closure of 15 gardens by Duncans. Early in 2015, the management abruptly
stopped paying wages to its workers. It also terminated food rations. It cut
electricity and drinking water supplies to worker colonies. For several years,
pensions and provident funds had not been paid. Gardens were not maintained,
and ageing, unproductive tea bushes, some a hundred years old, were not
replaced. Workers’ houses were not maintained for years. Workers allege both
apathy and runaway corruption by the management.
Such illegal semi-closure would jeopardise critically the
future of workers in any industry. But tea worker communities have been brought
up for generations in forced direct dependence on the management even for basic
essentials such as food, clean drinking water, housing and health care. For
them, sudden withdrawal by the management of not just regular employment, but
also all these life-enabling services, is nothing short of catastrophic.
I found workers surviving by travelling to neighbouring
gardens and working at low, piece-work rates. These garden managements are
profiting from their distress; they pick them up in buses for which they are
charged, and workers are forced to spend longer hours to earn far less in
uncertain casual employment, with no job security or additional benefits.
Others are mining stones on riverbeds and several younger workers have migrated
to Bhutan, Kerala, Delhi and Tamil Nadu. Children are dropping out of school
and joining the workforce to bring some food to the table. Adding to worker
distress, many are dependent on untreated stream water for drinking. No Duncan
tea estate has a functioning hospital since 2000: without doctors, medicine,
and occasionally a nurse.
Those we found most threatened by hunger were single
women, those ailing and the elderly. Phulo Munda, for instance, is a widow of
57 years. As a permanent worker, she earned around Rs.1,600 a month. But since
the undeclared closure, she has received no wages. She has only one meal a day.
When strong enough, she trudges to the river bed to break stones, for which she
gets Rs.70 a week. For August 2015, she earned just Rs.150. The condition of
her house is appalling, with virtually no walls. The wooden pillars to support
the tin roof were also bought by her. When it rains, she squats with an
umbrella inside the house, awake the whole night. Every day she walks 3
kilometres to fetch drinking water, and collects firewood from the forests
nearby. Food, fuel and housing were all guaranteed in the past by the
management.
This purgatory situation of semi-closure is patently
illegal, but labour officials and trade unions have done little to hold the
management and owners accountable. The State government has also not started
wage work or restored health care, drinking water or electricity in worker
habitations. In the inverse government morality of our times, States defend
morally and legally culpable failures by wealthy plantation owners and their
corrupt and inept managements. Workers are left defenceless, thrown to the edge
of survival.
Harsh Mander is a human rights worker, writer and teacher
(This article was originally published in The Hindu)
