#dnaEdit: Tea never tasted so bitter

The dead will never speak of the hard times, but it’s impossible to miss the pervasive gloom. Workers of West Bengal’s defunct tea gardens are dying of hunger and malnutrition virtually every week. In the last six days, two men from the Redbank tea estate in Jalpaiguri district passed away allegedly due to illness, but the root cause has been hunger. It’s another matter — though extremely pertinent —that the deceased didn’t get proper medical treatment. However, the most potent of medicines would fail to resuscitate a person suffering from chronic starvation.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has chosen to downplay the stark realities, when the fact is more than 30 workers of closed tea gardens have perished in the past seven months. She has attributed the mounting death toll to age-related ailments and other diseases since acknowledging the truth would have tarnished her government’s pro-poor image. Yet Banerjee alone must not be criticised when the Left and the BJP are also guilty. Neither the CPI-M, which ruled the state for 34 years, nor the BJP, which won the Darjeeling parliamentary seat twice in a row, cared about the plantation workers. Over the last 10 years nearly a thousand people — many of whom had been jobless — passed away due to starvation and diseases. Twenty two gardens had stopped functioning at one point in the Darjeeling-Dooars region, out of which five never resumed operations. Abandoned by the employers, the workers’ families survived on rats and snakes. Those employed are still paid a pittance — Rs95 per day — and forced to work and live under unhygienic conditions. Low levels of literacy and alcoholism have hastened their slide into sub-human conditions, making them vulnerable to exploitation.

An opposition suddenly waking up to the prospect of capitalising on the workers’ plight — ratcheting up the decibel level of protests in the assembly — has culminated in Banerjee announcing sops and measures for workers and the ailing tea industry. She has also sought financial aid from the Centre to tide over the crisis. The jobless will now get Rs1,500 per month under the Financial Assistance for Workers in Locked-out Industrial Units (FAWLOI) scheme, while 300 elderly men will benefit from old-age pension. The state’s panchayat department has allotted Rs2 crore for workers to be enrolled under the MGNREGA.

However, the all-important issue of wages in tea gardens has hit a roadblock with the unions and the management refusing to budge from their respective stands. The management is quick to blame militant trade unionism for the industry’s decline, which is partly true. At the same time, it must admit its role in the historic oppression of the workers — a legacy from the days of the Raj. Had the owners abided by the Plantation Workers Act, which made it obligatory for them to provide health care, housing and education, men, women and children wouldn’t have suffered this terrible fate. The proposal for a hike of Rs7 each year for the next three years has obviously not gone down well with the union members who are clamouring for wages in the region between Rs285 and Rs333. At this critical juncture, a stalemate is not in the best interests of the warring sides.