A group of men huddles
by the side of the tea bushes in the shade at Dheklapara Tea Estate in the
Dooars. Close by in the sun, about 30 or so women work their famed “nimble
fingers” on the first-flush tea leaves, heads trying to balance the heavy loads
of pickings.
One of the men has
just tossed up a green papaya salad on a Bengali broadsheet folded in half. The
unripe fruit is neatly peeled and diced, and dressed with coarsely-ground green
chilli and salt. Chilli-induced shhus and shhaas fill the air as
portions of the spiced berry go around, along with stale news.
Nimble fingers keep
plucking, steady heads don’t turn.
It’s one in the
afternoon—the end of work day. It’s not a normal business day since the estate is
officially closed, as it has been for the past 17 years. It’s just a group of
workers—those that remain—plucking and selling the green leaves to outside
factories as a survival strategy. Given the nature of tea work and the workers’
habitual discipline, everything is still done by the clock, though for shorter
hours, and smaller pay. At 1p.m., the women trudge to the makeshift leaf shade,
measure their day’s work in kilos, offload; and vanish into the labour lines.
The men have had their
salad; they load a pick-up van waiting by the side of the bamboo bearing faded
flags of the Trinamool Congress party. For women, their labour in the tea
estates seldom bears fruit.
With elections
underway, tea workers have been remembered again.
“My connection with
West Bengal is special—it is a tea connection,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi
told a massive gathering at Mainaguri in north Bengal in February. “You grow
tea and I make tea.”
When he came back to
the region on April 3, he spoke of the plight of tea workers. In his speech to
an even larger crowd in Siliguri, he promised to solve the problems of tea
workers.
With the “chaiwala” Prime Minister tracing his roots
to the tea bushes of north Bengal, home to 273 estates and countless small,
cooperative-run gardens, employing over 4.5 lakh workers, tea is stirring the
polls up. Issues concerning tea workers, particularly the Minimum Wages Act
1948 and reopening of closed gardens are on the lips of candidates of all
political parties.
Garden Closed, No Vote.
“Well, earlier too
tea-related problems used to be part of election speeches—this region being a
tea-producing belt, there is no escaping that. But we are now seeing candidates
of all hues making tea a major issue. Instead of general “‘ea workers’
problems”, they are raising specific concerns such as minimum wages and land
rights for workers,” said Abhijit Mazumdar, a rights activist.
The white of the A4
posters stands out against the dull walls of the factory of Dooteriah tea
estate in Darjeeling, closed since June 2017.
“Garden Closed, No
Vote,” say the black & white printouts in English and Nepali. The posters
have been recently put up by workers and staff of Dooteriah, Peshok and Kallej
Valley—all closed tea estates in Darjeeling—threatening to abstain from the polls
to protest abysmal conditions in the plantations, and to demand their immediate
reopening.
However, after a
meeting with district magistrate Joyoshi Dasgupta, the joint action committee
of workers spearheading the movement called off its programme. “We were told
she (Dasgupta) has promised to help workers set up a cooperative, but that
didn’t really sound convincing,” said Asha Pradhan, a tea plucker and activist,
still firm on her resolve to not vote. “What is the point when no one cares?”
Pradhan is unusual
among women tea workers. She is aware of workers’ rights and vocal with her
views. She even travelled as part of the Chaaybagan Sangram Samity, a
rights-based organisation, to Delhi for the All India Workers’ Rally on March 3
and spoke there about the problems facing tea workers in Darjeeling.
With the official
vote-boycott programme called off, workers are wondering whom to vote for. Some
are even contemplating NOTA to express their discontentment. “Many are going
for Modi baje’s (grandfather) candidate,” said one worker, referring to
Bharatiya Janata Party’s Darjeeling candidate Raju Bista. “Khai ta, Modi
baje’s earlier candidate (sitting MP S.S. Ahluwalia) also promised to do
a lot for us. That time we voted for him, but he did nothing at all,” she added.
Tea in West Bengal is
produced in three geographic regions—Darjeeling in the hills and Dooars and
Terai at the base of the Himalayas. Darjeeling produces some of the world’s
finest and most expensive black orthodox teas, which are mostly exported—a kilo
of Makaibari’s organic silver tips sold for $1,850 ( ₹1.1 lakh) to three
international buyers in 2014. Dooars and Terai are home to the cheap crush,
tear and curl (CTC) teas consumed mostly in the domestic market.
A colonial legacy—only
eight of the plantations in north Bengal were set up after Independence—tea is
one sector where women outnumber men. According to the Labour Bureau records of
2012, women comprise 53.3 per cent of the workforce in tea plantations. It is
women who perform the arduous task of plucking green tea leaves in gardens—huge
tracts of land, steep slopes in the case of Darjeeling; not to be mistaken for
the small plots adjoining homes to grow flowers and fruits.
There is a reason for
this unusually high number of women workers. Though romanticised legends put it
to “nimble fingers”, their predominance is because of the industry’s demand for
cheap labour. Gardens required inexpensive labour, wrote Jeff Koehler in his
book, The Colourful History and Precarious Fate of the World’s Greatest Tea.
Quoting the Darjeeling Gazetteer (1907), he said this was “a matter of
vital importance to the [tea] industry, as cheap labour is essential to its
prosperity.”
Women’s cheap labour
ensured profitability.
A woman produces, and
also reproduces. “Employment of women in plantations historically was sought by
planters to “contain the male labour force” and to “ensure a steady
reproduction of ‘cheap’ labour” as recruitment costs were high,” Rinju Rasaily,
an assistant professor with Ambedkar University’s sociology department, wrote
in a discussion paper. Maintaining a “steady social reproduction of labour” is
one of the reasons for more women than men, she said, writing on the topic
“Women’s Labour in the Tea Sector: Changing trajectories and Emerging Challenges”.
The truth is, be it an
operational garden, or the closed Dheklapara or Dooteriah, the story of tea is
the saga of women’s exploitation in generally hostile geographies and confined
spaces.
But, the visibility of
women workers is restricted to colourful images of them plucking leaves in
exotic geographic locales, warm smiles and heavy baskets in place. Discourse
around the industry is never about women or their centrality in the process of
producing the world’s most popular brew. As Anuradha Talwar, the labour rights
activist puts it. “They don’t exist as women…They are spoken of as if they are
men. The entire female workforce is just invisibilised.”
While women make the
bulk of the workforce, and also the crowd in political rallies, all key positions
are held by men. “Trade union leaders, management staff, government officials,
everyone is a man,” said Talwar.
Women do the
back-breaking job of plucking tea leaves and yet the highest they’ve risen in
their jobs to any form of supervisory role is that of a sub-staff, also called sardar
or kaamdaar. Even after a century of existence and lakhs of women in the
workforce, no tea garden has ever seen a woman manager. “It is only now when
men are migrating in search of other jobs that you see women on factory
floors,” said Talwar.
The survey of 273
operational tea estates conducted by the West Bengal labour department in May
2013, in its 325-page report, mentions “female workers” only in the section on
maternity benefits. The meticulous report does not even give the number of
women employed in the tea sector. It only speaks about “workers” and “workmen”.
Sample this: “In 231 Tea Estates out of 273 there is provision for school. The
wards of the workmen of remaining 42 Tea Estates go to nearby schools for education
(sic).”
Elections are no
different. Even as everyone cries hoarse over the plight of tea workers, there
is little mention of women workers.
A little downhill from the Dooteriah factory,
Sharmila Sharma and a few other women are breaking stones by the river. “I had
never imagined I would be breaking stones,” says Sharmila, remembering the day
she married her childhood love “uilenai”(long time ago), when she was
“15 or 16”. She smiles at her memories, never once lifting her head, as she
keeps hammering. Sundown—which happens sooner in the mountains—is approaching
and she’s trying to get three boris (sacks) ready. Her entire day’s back
breaking work brings her ₹30 per bori.
She has made herself a
contraption with a circular rubber strap tied to a wooden handle (shaped like a
giant magnifying glass). She places the smaller stones in the middle of it,
keeping her left hand over the handle while she hammers with the other. “The
stones keep running away unless you hold them in one place. This keeps me from
hitting my own hand while breaking the smaller stones.”
The first blow came
when her tea worker husband, Gopal, died “of high pressure” in 2010. “He collapsed
on the factory floor and never revived.” With two children to look after, she
joined the garden as a tea plucker soon after.
But barely had
Sharmila Sharma begun working than trouble started in the estate, owned by
Kanwar Deep Singh of the Alchemist Group, a Rajya Sabha member on a Trinamool
Congress ticket.
“Trouble began around
the same time that Sarada Ghotala happened,” remembers Aashish Lama,
factory staff and member of the joint action committee, which together with
employees of neighbouring closed gardens, Peshok and Kalej Valley, who also
share the same ownership, is fighting for their reopening.
The Sarada financial
scandal came to light in April 2013 with the collapse of the Sarada Group, a
consortium of over 200 private companies running a Ponzi scam in West Bengal
and adjacent states. At the time of the collapse, it was reported that the
group had raised about ₹4,000 crore from over 1.7 million depositors.
The scam shone the
spotlight on other chit-funds and in July the same year the Securities
Appellate Tribunal directed Alchemist Infra, a subsidiary of KD Singh’s
Alchemist Group, to refund about ₹1,000 crore collected from about 15 lakh
depositors using unauthorised “collective investment schemes”. Last year, the
enforcement directorate seized Singh’s assets worth ₹238 crore in connection
with an alleged chit-fund scam of ₹1,900 crore.
“The fringe benefits
stopped first, like money for umbrella, boots, dokos (cane baskets to
carry tea leaves)—things workers need while plucking leaves,” said Suraj Hawal,
a senior member of the joint action committee, “The bonus stopped in 2016. The
company owes the workers and staff ₹19 crore.”
It is while pursuing
the case of reopening the garden that Hawal and his colleagues discovered that
the lease had not been renewed since 1987.Tea estates operate on lands leased
from the state government. “We were told by the district magistrate that there
can be no dialogue as long as the lease is not renewed,” he said. With the
estate abandoned by its owners—Fortune Chemical Ltd bought the estate from
Trident in 2018, which took over the company from Alchemist in 2016—there’s no
solution in sight.
More than 80 per cent
of the 1,356 workers are women.
In 2017, after a good
first flush, Darjeeling’s tea industry was busying itself for the second
flush—20 per cent of total production and 40 per cent of annual revenues—when
the hills erupted in political turmoil. Tea workers, particularly women, were
the worst hit.
Days passed into
weeks, and weeks into months, a general strike called by the local,
pro-Gorkhaland parties lasted 105 days, bringing life in the hills and the tea
gardens to an absolute halt. Demonstrations, arson, loot and clashes and police
raids became the order of the day. Darjeeling town resembled a war zone. About
a dozen people were reportedly killed in separate incidents across Darjeeling
district, some allegedly in police firing—a charge denied by the government.
“Khai kasari kasari
(Well, don’t really know how),” says Sharmila Sharma, her eyes still fixed on
the stones, when asked how she managed to run a household in that time. More
silence. The hammer keeps pounding, and the river keeps flowing.
It is the woman’s job
to put food on the plate, says the more vocal Asha Pradhan, it is she who
suffers most when there isn’t enough. “From foraging in the forests, to taking
loans and selling off household items to buy over-priced ration in the grey
market, women have done it all,” she says.
The strike ended, but
the estate remained closed. A clueless Sharmila waited, and waited for the
management to return and resume work, but no one came. The workers made several
trips to the administrative offices, in vain. Then when all hopes were lost,
she got herself a hammer and a rubber contraption resembling the rim of a giant
magnifying glass, and started breaking stones by the river.
In season, she plucks
tea in neighbouring gardens and also at Dooteriah, where the workers and staff
have come together as an informal body to pluck the green leaves and sell them
to gardens outside. Sharma is currently waiting for the first flush to be ready
so that she can take a break from stones and pluck green leaves, which will
bring her Rs 25 a kilo. On average, she can pluck 4-5 kg of first flush tea a
day.
For Darjeeling tea
growers, who are mostly Nepali-speaking Indians, or Gorkhas, a separate state
of Gorkhaland is their utopia. So, when a call for a strike came from the
political leadership, tea garden workers, with women in large numbers,
responded spontaneously. Women would also be seen in demonstrations organised
in their neighbourhoods.
But Gorkhaland never
came. It was more than a quarter of a year without work, wages or rations; or
even any news of the world outside (cable TV was taken off air and internet
withdrawn by the government). Initially, Asha Pradhan didn’t mind—she believed in
the Gorkhaland dream, that a separate state would bring better times for
ordinary workers like her and a brighter future for her children. What shocked
was the outcome. After months of believing that Gorkhaland was around the
corner, the strike was called off without progress on the issue of a separate
state. The leaders struck a deal with the government and the earlier autonomous
hill body, Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, was reinstated.
“We were back to
square one,” she remarks, sipping tea—Dooteriah orthodox (hand-made by herself)
with milk and sugar. “It felt like the whole house came down on us… It will
take some time for us to recover, economically and mentally both.”
After the strike,
Gorkha Janmukti Morhca, the party spearheading the statehood agitation, split
into two—one faction supports the Trinamool Congress and the other the BJP in
this election. Neither party has Gorkhaland in its election agenda.
“The others have moved
on—salaried people in government got paid for the strike period. It is the tea
garden workers who got nothing and, in our case, the estate has closed
altogether,” says Pradhan.
June 25, 1955, was a
historic day in the labour history of Bengal plantations. On this day, six
protestors, two of them women, were killed in police firing at Darjeeling’s
Margaret’s Hope tea garden. They were demanding a wage hike and a host of other
things, including maternity leave. This was the first organised labour movement
in the tea sector and it paved the way for greater labour activism.
More than 60 years on,
the story of tea workers is still one of injustice and exploitation.
In spite of being industrial
workers,tea garden workers get paid much less than other workers—even less than
labourers in neighbouring construction sites. This observation comes from West
Bengal’s labour department which conducted a survey of Bengal’s tea gardens in
2013. “A livelihood with these wages is unaffordable,” said the survey report.
Tea workers are currently paid ₹176 per day.(Until 1976, when the Equal
Remuneration Act was passed, women were paid less than men.)
The wage is decided
through collective bargaining, or tripartite negotiations among the trade
unions, management and the government. Trade unions have long been demanding
the fixing of minimum wages under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948. “In Kerala, the
minimum is ₹310 and in Tamil Nadu ₹283,” said Abhijit Mazumdar, who is also
convenor of the joint forum of 29 tea trade unions of north Bengal fighting for
the implementation of the Minimum Wages Act, among other things. “Workers of
Assam and Bengal, who produce 75 per cent of India’s tea, get the least because
their wages are not fixed under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948.”
The managements
justify the low wage citing the “non-cash components” of free housing,
subsidised foodgrain, firewood, healthcare and children’s education. But these
exist mostly on paper as increasingly, estate owners default on these
components.
In 2015, the West
Bengal government set up an advisory committee with nine representatives each
from the government, management and workers, but even after 17 rounds of talks
there has been little progress. “From the workers’ side we have made our
submissions, but are yet to see any tangible development. We suspect the
government is colluding with plantation associations to delay or derail the
implementation of the Act altogether,” said Mazumdar.
“The industry has
highlighted the peculiar nature of the sector where the worker not only resides
within the tea estate but is entitled to various benefits under the Plantation
Labour Act 1951,” said P. K. Bhattacharjee, Kolkata-based secretary general of
the Tea Association of India. “The cash value of those amenities, namely
housing, healthcare, children’s education and non-statutory benefits like
firewood, dry tea, etc, need to be incorporated while fixing the minimum wage,
as is provided under section 11 of the Minimum Wages Act.”
However, the 2013
survey of 273 tea estates points at gross violations of the Plantation Labour
Act. Some of the finding are:
- Only 1,66,591 out of 2,62,426 workers have houses provided by the management.
- Six tea estates (three in the hills & three in the Dooars) have not provided a single house to workers.
- 12 estates in the Dooars have not provided electricity in workers’ homes.
- 98 tea estates don’t have any medical staff.
- Only 166 estates have hospitals. Only 56 of them have full-time residential doctors and others depend on visiting doctors. “Out of doctors of 166 Tea Estates only 74 have degree of MBBS, others are non-MBBS,” says the report. 116 hospitals don’t have any nurse.
- There is no Labour Welfare Officer in 175 estates.
- 42 estates have no schools for children.
- In 2009-10, 24 tea estates did not deposit any amount towards provident fund contribution. The number was 18 in 2010-11, 13 in 2011-2012, 41 in 2012-13
- 44 estates do not have any latrines.
When this is the
situation in running gardens, one can only imagine the state of closed ones.
Currently, 16 gardens are closed in north Bengal, affecting the lives of nearly
24,000 workers and their families.
The crisis in the tea
industry began in the mid-2000s for a number of reasons, such as the decline in
international prices, competition from other countries (Kenya, Nepal and Sri
Lanka), rising production costs despite stagnant prices in the domestic market.
“Another major factor has been competition from small growers,” said
Bhattacharjee.
In the past twenty
years or so there has been a massive growth in the small sector, helped in
large part by the Tea Board of India. Currently, small growers contribute 47
per cent to India’s total tea production. “There is a perceptible difference in
the process through which the bought leaf factory (independent factories that
source leaf from small growers) procures and manufactures tea and this lends a
cost advantage,” Bhattacharjee said. “The organised sector is tied to a host of
obligations, statutory or otherwise, and are at their wits’ end to match the
advantage of the bought leaf factories.When tea is available at lower prices
the appetite to go for higher priced tea is just not there among buyers.
“To put it simply, the
industry is going through an existential crisis.”
The crisis has
increased the burden on women workers, historically at the bottom of the
plantation hierarchy. Curtailment of fringe benefits and delayed and irregular
wages have added to the woes of women who are also constantly battling
“With male workers
migrating, it would be reasonable to infer that nearly 40 per cent of women
workers have to support 60 per cent of family members besides themselves,”
Bhattacharjee said. “This is a high dependency rate.”
Women, who were
resistant to migrating initially, largely for fear of losing housing which is
linked to their jobs, are now fleeing the estates in large numbers, many
landing in the net of traffickers.
Migration and
trafficking are major issues with women in tea plantations. Of the 500 or so
trafficked girls and women rescued by Panighata tea estate resident Rangu
Souriya and her non-governmental organisation Kanchenjunga Uddhar Kendra, the
majority are from the tea garden areas, mostly closed estates. “There are
organised cartels working here,” she said. “Big jobs are promised, young girls
are even trapped in romantic relationships and marriages; and the poor hapless
women from the remote tea gardens end up as highly-exploited domestic workers
or sex workers in various brothels across the country,” she added.
“Women are migrating
in large numbers,” said Debarati Sen, assistant professor of Anthropology and
International Conflict Management at Kennesaw State University, who has closely
studied the lives of women tea workers and the author of Everyday
Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling. “None of
the workers’ daughters want to do anything with tea. They want to do something better,
and in this desperation to get out, they end up in predatory relationships with
men who traffick them.”
Describing the
situation of women in the tea sector as cyclical doomed stories Sen said women
are forever trapped in the cycle of structural violence that has been
perpetuated over centuries.
In February 2013,
ahead of the assembly elections the state government implemented the National
Food Security Act in the form of Khadya Sathi scheme to provide fixed
quantities of rice and wheat at ₹2 per kilo to very poor sections of the
population, which includes tea plantation workers.
In 2014, the state
government extended the Financial Assistance for Workers of Locked-Out
Industries (FOWLOI) scheme to tea plantation workers under which the jobless
workers of closed or abandoned estates for more than a year are given a
one-time payment of ₹1,500.
In many closed
gardens, employees have formally and informally come together to pluck green
leaves to sell to other gardens or bought-leaf factories. “Men take over the
cooperatives as soon as there are big money transactions,” said anthropologist
Sen describing how even in a less-exploitative set-up of cooperative farming
women are robbed of their agency and placed where they have historically
belonged, at the bottom.
In Darjeeling, in such
worker-run set-ups,women are paid proportionate to the job done—usually ₹20-25
per kg. In the Dooars, they earn a fixed wage of ₹60 per day (8am to 1pm).
Of the countless
rivers and streams in the Dooars that originate in Bhutan are Reti and Dumchi.
The two seasonal, raid-fed rivers meet in India a little distance from the
border. In the area between the two arms of the riverine Y lie Dheklapara
(closed since 2002) and Bundapani tea estates (closed since 2013).
I reach Dheklapara
after crossing two rivers and Bundapani by crossing another one. The rivers
don’t have any bridges, I drive through them. They are dry.
When dry, the
riverbeds are a flurry of activity. They are the highways on which heavy-duty
dumper trucks ferry the dolomite mined in Bhutan hills, raising clouds of dust
over the stone miners, most of them out-of-job tea workers of Bundapani and
Dheklapara.
During monsoons, the
rivers become a natural divide cutting off the estates and the surrounding
villages—Garochira and Kalapani and Reti forest village—from the rest of the
world. Over 15,000 people are marooned inside the triangle formed by Bhutan
hills on one side, the north, and the rivers on the remaining sides for long
stretches.
“We try to hoard as
much grain as we can before getting cut off,” said Jagadish Munda, a local
leader who worked at Dheklapara tea estate hospital before it closed down.
Everything comes to a
standstill, children don’t go to school and those who travel outside in search
of odd jobs stay indoors. When anyone takes ill, the only thing to do is to
wait for the river levels to come down. Till that time shamans and faith
healers offer whatever they can.
The proprietors
abandoned Dheklapara in 2002. From then till 2007, it saw three new owners come
and go, with the last one disappearing without a trace. “In 2011, under the
watch of the Calcutta High Court, it was liquidated and handed over to the Tea
Board which ran the garden for two years before surrendering,” said Bikas Roy,
central committee member of the Terai Dooars Plantation Workers’ Union. “It is
now with the Calcutta High Court. A few years ago, fresh tenders were invited
forbids from interested entrepreneurs but nobody turned up.”
Bundapani too saw three owners since 1996 before being totally abandoned in 2013. The next year, the West Bengal government cancelled its land lease and took over the garden, but has not managed to get the estate running. The workers are owed over 12 crore in provident fund, pension, gratuity, wages and other benefits.
This garden has to reopen and we need to get our jobs back, our wages and our dues
Tea workers fell into
bad times when the gardens closed.There were 605 workers in Dheklapara and 1215
in Bundapani, over half of them women.According to Raju Thapa, who was a worker
at Bundapani and is currently a senior member of the Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor
Samity, an organisation fighting for labour rights, as many as 60 workers and
their family members died of hunger and malnutrition at his estate in the first
six months of the shutdown.
Many also died due to
lack of health care. Parul Tanti of Dheklapara was expecting her second child.
She was still about 15 days from the expected date of delivery when her water
broke. “This must be sometime after the garden closed,” her husband Shubhraj
Tanti tries hard to remember. “We did not have any healthcare facility at the
garden then and we could not take her to hospital (Birpara, about 15 km away)
because the rivers were in spate.”
A healthy boy was
born, but the mother died. When the boy was nine days’ old, Tanti gave him to
his brother-in-law in the neighbouring tea estate to adopt, because he was not
sure he’d be able to raise the baby with the estate closed, and without the
support of his wife.
“It had rained so much
that we were cut off for 15 days that year,” recalls Parul Tanti’s brother
Bhanu Tanti. The day after her death, the skies cleared and Bhanu Tanti managed
to go across the Dumchi to fetch the doctor from the neighbouring Joy Birpara
Tea Estate to write his sister’s death certificate.
Now they get some
relief in the form of subsidised rations and financial assistance from the
government.
“How long to survive
on relief?” says an exasperated Manju Thapa of Bundapani, balancing herself on
the cycle, one leg on the ground. “This garden has to reopen and we need to get
our jobs back, our wages and our dues.” She has just cycled across three
riverbeds, to get home from Binnaguri cantonment where she works as a cook in
the homes of two schoolteachers, a job that brings her ₹3000 a month. With that
money the widow has to fend for her son, who will be appearing for class X
board exams next year, and her mother-in-law.
Both Nepalis and
adivasis, who were originally conscripted from the tribal areas of Jharkhand,
comprise the labour force in Dooars. “The adivasi women are even more
marginalised,” said Debarati Sen.
Twenty-five-year-old
Meena Thapa sits on her haunches by the water pipe on the side of a dirt road
at the end of the garden, very close to the border with Bhutan.
She collects the
trickling water in a small mug and empties it into a 20-litre jerrycan. The
mouth of the pipe being too close to the ground it cannot directly fill up the
container. It takes about half an hour to fill one jerrycan, she needs at least
six. She spends two-three, sometimes more, hours every day to meet the water
needs of her family of six.
“I usually come here
in the afternoons, after finishing the household chores,” says the mother of
two.
Things were not like this when she first came, as a bride, to this garden six-seven years ago from the nearby Lankapara Tea Estate (now closed). When the estate was functioning, workers had water connections in their labour lines. When it closed, water supply also stopped.
Twenty-nine-year-old
Rajni Baxla is part of the train of women ferrying water in pairs of colourful
jerry-cans balanced on their cycles. A former tea plucker, the mother of three
mines stones on the river bed all morning, a job that brings her Rs 150-200 a
day. Her afternoons go into providing water for the family.
Manju Thapa also joins
in after a quick lunch of rice and vegetables that she had cooked early in the
morning, before setting out on her cycle to cook for her employers in the
outside world where no one is worried about water. She makes three trips to the
water source, each time loaded with two jerrycans of 20 litres each. She bought
the cans—which originally contained pesticide meant for tea bushes—from a shop
in Birpara for Rs 250 each.
In the afternoon, after
the women return from plucking leaves, or breaking stones or cooking in the
homes of people across three rivers, they make a beeline to water sources
around the Bhutan border. Some have piles of laundry on them. Some have water
dripping from their hair, their clothes soaking wet and the insides of their
fingers all shrivelled up after a long, wet afternoon.
Children seem to have
the most fun—cycling in groups, racing at times, teasing each other; but they
are at work. They supply water to those homes who have no one to do the job
themselves. Most able-bodied men and women have migrated. “I give the money to
my mother,” says a 12-year-old Krish Lohar, chewing at a raw betel nut. He
supplies water to five households, charges ₹10 for every jerrycan of 20 litres,
makes about ₹200 a day.
Manju Thapa tries to
keep her son out of all this, next year he will be appearing in the board
exams. “He already has to put in a lot of hard work. He has to cycle to school
(in Binnaguri) everyday, crossing the three river beds,” she says. When the
garden was functioning, there used to be a school-bus.
Sometimes even this
supply gets disrupted, either due to lack of maintenance or the ‘unmindful’
herds of elephants—lying at the intersection of Jaldapara National Park,
Gorumara National Park and Buxa Tiger Reserve these areas fall in the elephant
corridor.
“There are no natural
water sources in the estate,” explains Raju Thapa. The plantation lies at an
altitude of 1,135 feet and the water table goes down to 350 feet during summers.
“It is impossible to bore wells to that depth. The only way to get water is by
tapping the rivers in Bhutan. That’s how the management used to get water and
paid a cess to the Bhutan government in exchange.After the garden shut down,
water supply also got cut off.”
That it is not
possible to extract ground water has not stopped local bodies from politics
over them. In several places there are deep tube wells supplied by government
agencies, like Potemkin villages as they cannot function in such a geography.
An overhead tank lies abandoned.
Dheklapara and
Bundapani fall in Alipurduar Lok Sabha constituency where both frontrunners are
residents of tea estates, and adivasis—Dasrath Tirkey, sitting Member of
Parliament from the Trinamool Congress and John Barla of the Bharatiya Janata
Party.
Tirkey has promised
minimum wages to workers and also a wage board, apart from trying to reopen
closed gardens. Kicking off his campaign at the Chuapara tea estate on March
30, he said: “Earlier the British exploited us, adivasis and Nepalis, as they
needed cheap labour. In this age, the same mentality to exploit us cannot go
on.” He also promised safe drinking water.
“Minimum wages, reopening
of closed tea gardens and land rights to the tea workers—these are the main
issues for me,” said Barla.
Thanks to years of
disciplining in plantation environments, most women workers are reticent and
reluctant to engage in conversations around politics. They almost always draw a
blank when asked what they want as women and reluctantly open up on persistence.
“Everything will be
fine, if the garden opens again,” says Manju Thapa. “There will be work, our
people will be back. It will be the same life again… There is nothing more I
want.”
Rubina Khatun (name
changed), a plucker at a Terai tea garden considers a larger picture. “I am not
going to vote for Modi I know,” says the woman in her late 20s who was rescued
from a brothel in Pune by Souriya. “He does not like us, Muslims.” Souriya is
helping her build a home for her to stay with her son. She was rejected by her
husband after she returned from Pune where she was tricked into going by a
friend and sold off at a brothel.
According to Bebika
Khawas, a researcher at North Bengal University, for all their appearance of
indifference, tea garden women are most concerned about the elections because
they are directly impacted by the outcomes. “They have to run families, educate
children, arrange fuel and water supplies. They care,” says Khawas.
“Will you vote?” I ask a female plucker, as starts moving towards the leaf-shade. “Yes, why not?” immediately comes the reply as she walks off with her jhola of green leaves balanced on the head. “This is my right.”
is an independent journalist based in Kolkata.
