BATTLEGROUND WEST BENGAL - Netas bid for votes of hungry tea garden workers

From dawn till late in the day, Mongra Oraon draws 50 buckets of water from a well to irrigate a small patch of the sprawling Bundapani Tea Estate in Birpara in the Dooars. The garden has been shut for years, but Mongra diligently carries on the back-breaking work to keep the crop healthy.“If we don't water the bushes, red spiders will af fect leaf production. We'l lose our only source of sustenance. We can en dure hard labour in scorching heat but not hunger,“ the sweatdrenched labourer says. The garden is among seven in the Dooars either closed or abandoned, affecting the livelihood of nearly 1 lakh workers. Some, including Bundapani, were taken over by the state three years ago, but they are yet to reopen.
Matters are much worse for another set of 1 lakh workers in 11 gardens that are neither closed, nor operational. They function only during the plucking season and remain shut rest of the year.There is no government dole for these workers as the gardens are not officially shut.
Observers say the once-thriving tea industry is deliberately being driven into crisis by short-term profit motives. “Few gardens have their owners here. Most are operated by traders who've leased the gardens for a few years,“ says Manab Dasgupta, former head of economics department at North Bengal University .
Overuse of a deadly cocktail of fertilisers and pesticide will soon run the gardens to seed, and they'll ultimately D be abandoned, he says. Most of the 4.5 lakh workers who work in the gardens in Dooars and Terai are illiterate and dependent on semi-literate union leaders for everything from workdays to wage negotiation to any bonus. “With the worker count in each garden a few thousand, managements speak to union leaders. There used to be four-five major unions earlier, several new ones have sprung up now.It is through these unions that new owners control the gardens' functioning,“ said a tea industry official. Closure of the gardens has driven workers to near starvation -there have been nearly 200 deaths in the Dooars since September 2015 though government puts the toll at 78. Many have been driven to work as daily labour in Bhutan, breaking boulders on the river bed for Rs 45-50 a day . The lack of livelihood has meant Union leaders have a vice-like grip on their lives.
While traders use these dubi ous union leaders all year, politicians bank on them during elections. The 4.5 lakh workforce in Dooars and Terai mostly vote en bloc, 80% are tribal. For netas, getting the Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Vikas Parishad (ABAVP) on one's side is crucial for parties.
The GJM (Gorkha Jamukhti Morcha) controls a big chunk of the Nepali vote (10% of the workers) in the gardens. It is backing the CPM-Congress combine; ABAVP is leaning towards Trinamool.
That should have ensured victory for Mamata Banerjee's party in Nagrakata and Malbazar where over 70% of voters are tribal. But the equation changed this year with a split in ABAVP. John Barla, an influential tribal leader and former ABAVP president, who floated Progressive Tea Workers Union, is now a BJP candidate in Nagrakata.

Source: Times of India, 19-03-2016

Hunger brews in Bengal’s tea estates

North Bengal’s tea estates are witnessing an unfolding human tragedy as more deaths of tea garden workers were reported this month from the region. With the industry as a whole struggling from soft prices and a drop in output as climate change affects rainfall and weather conditions across the country’s tea-growing regions, several estates are reportedly being unofficially shut, leaving thousands of hapless workers in the lurch. And even at gardens that are operating, living conditions for the predominantly female workforce are said to be precarious, with access to housing, sanitation, healthcare and drinking water far from adequate. A delegation of the State Assembly’s Standing Committee on Labour that visited four tea estates cited malnutrition as an apparent cause for the recent deaths of workers and said the State government was not doing enough to resolve the crisis. Separately, an international fact-finding mission headed by the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition that visited tea gardens in West Bengal and Assam earlier this month painted a grim picture of extremely low wages driving thousands of families to hunger and malnutrition. With a majority of the labour landless, tribal migrants who have little to no other skills to help them find gainful work, the closures and unpaid wages in many estates are spurring a surge in the incidence of starvation. While West Bengal’s Labour Minister this month told legislators the government was providing jobs under the MGNREGA, medical vans and midday meals to workers at the closed tea gardens, and challenged opposition members to prove the deaths were due to starvation and not natural causes, there is a tacit admission that there is a crisis requiring the State’s intervention. The Minister’s comment that none of the death certificates show starvation as the cause of death is tragically ironic since acute hunger and dehydration leave a person too weak to work or even stir out seeking food or water as alms. The victim ultimately dies of organ failure or an opportunistic infection that the body can’t fight.

The bleak situation of these workers starkly highlights the absence of a social security net for rural workers, and specifically labour in the plantation sector. Unless governments both at the Centre and the State develop adequate mechanisms to safeguard the basic needs of non-unionised workers in vulnerable sectors such as the plantations, all efforts at labour law reform will be quite vacuous and bereft of any meaning to the key factor of economic productivity: the worker. Rising above partisan political considerations, the West Bengal government needs to act urgently to address the crisis and, if warranted, take strong legal action against the managements of tea estates that have landed their workers on the brink of starvation and death. A longer-term rehabilitation and re-skilling package is also required to help labour at the defunct estates find alternative work, and measures must be taken, separately, to rejuvenate this key employment-providing sector.

Keywords: Bengal tea estates, tea gardens, West Bengal

Source: The Hindu, 29-12-2015