Focus: The Hidden Side of the Darjeeling Tea Plantation Workers
The tea workers in West Bengal live in unimaginably poor conditions. While several State Government Schemes are in place to provide tea workers with basic necessities, the ground realities are very different.
While I try to stick to professionalism while delivering news items, I could not restrict myself from using “first person” to share this story. Darjeeling is my second home. I spent my entire childhood and several years of my youth in Darjeeling. While Darjeeling is famous for tea, it is popular for another thing, ghost stories. The ghost stories of the tea estates are popular with children and tea plantation workers. The stories become more interesting because of the surroundings. However, the story I am about to share is deadlier than any ghost recital I have ever heard: the story of tea plantation workers.
The tea workers in Darjeeling and Dooars spend their entire lives toiling on the dangerous slopes of the mountains. The world celebrates the tea these tea workers produce, but no one realizes the dismal condition of these workers. They live and toil in inhuman conditions with bare minimum wages not enough to raise a family.
While it is true that several State Government schemes are in place to take care of the tea workers, the ground realities are quite different. The beneficiaries of various housing schemes, such as Cha Sundari, express dissatisfaction due to the lack of proper infrastructure and basic facilities.
An article published on Village Square mentions the following:
“These life-long tea pickers are caught in an intergenerational cycle of labor, with no rights to land or a home of their own. The children have had to take on their parents’ jobs to retain tied housing, called labor quarters, at the plantations when their parents retire.”
“Workers are generally indentured and often face exploitation in remote areas with limited access to welfare services. With daily wages of a little over Rs 200, they can hardly nurture ambitions of life beyond the confines of hardscrabble plantation work,” the article further reads.
The tea workers are now on the verge of revolution. The tea plantation workers are now aggressively demanding proper housing, land, and basic amenities.
The Village Square article reads:
“But the long-standing system is facing an unprecedented challenge lately. A revolution is brewing in the gardens, with people demanding land, housing, and basic amenities in a quest to end the cycle of misery — change the status quo.”
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