Starving plantation workers just a campaign rhetoric in north Bengal tea belt

Tokai Munda’s father died today. He had a stroke and passed away on the spot. But Tokai is worried about something else. “I could not go to work today,” he says. “How will I feed my family tomorrow?”

Tokai lives in the vicinity of the Birpara Tea Garden spread across 200 acres in North Bengal’s Aliporeduar district. Here and in the adjoining district of Jalpaiguri, 152 tea gardens, which employ close to 4 lakh workers, occupy most of the land. However, many of the tea gardens today have gone defunct, driving the tea workers towards destitution. The ones still in operation have not been paying the labourers on time. 

The tea estates started getting obsolete back in 2002, but the situation has only intensified with time. Plantation workers and their families have been facing the ire of the inactivity of the industry.

“For the last year or so, we have been able to cook only once a day,” says Tokai wife Minika, adding Tokai’s 70-year old father, Darjan, had been ill for the last four days but when the family cannot afford food, medical treatment is beyond imagination. “We drink water at night and go to sleep.”

According to the United Tea Worker’s Front, Dooars, more than 1000 tea workers have died of starvation in North Bengal in the last 12 years. Abhijit Majumdar, member of the Siliguri Welfare Association and Secretary CPI(ML), says 360 people have been victims of starvation and famine in between March 2015 to December 2015.

Darjan is the latest addition to the tally.  He passed away early morning. It is now well past noon but there is still time for his last rites. A tranquil muddy lane surrounded by trees leads to his one-room tin-roofed house. As birds chirp in the background, a narrow entrance carved out of bamboo opens up to an old-fashioned house, where Darjan’s dead body is lying on the floor covered with a white mattress. His distraught weary-looking wife, Dasma, sits by the body. 

“We do not have money to perform his last rites,” says Tokai. “The tea garden committee would probably help us out.” Tokai has two younger brothers, a wife, mother and three kids to look after. Now with the father gone, the responsibility on his young shoulders palpably hangs around his neck. A day’s work ensures the family eats at least once in 24 hours, he says. 

Nobody has come to visit or console the family of the deceased. The neighbours  in the village are still away in the tea gardens, plucking leaves for their daily wages. The workers cannot afford to skip work and miss their daily wage, even if their old friend is no more. “Once they come back, we will proceed and cremate him,” informs Tokai. 

Yet, Darjan’s death is not likely to be a hunger death for the administrators. Successive governments have blamed it on various “illnesses” and called the accusations “politically motivated”.

Ironically, when the hunger deaths transpired in 2014-15, the TMC government’s response was eerily similar to what the left front had to say in 2002-03 when similar endemic plagued North Bengal. In 2007, when the then governor of West Bengal met some poverty-stricken tea workers in Jalpaiguri to understand their quagmire, it was reported the Left leaders passed some snide remarks making fun of the visit.

It appears the administrative denial here has been inculcated from the Brits. At the beginning of the Great Bengal Famine, the then Bengal Government and the Government of India ignored such deaths until eventually acknowledging it in 1943. Lord Wavell, the then Viceroy of India, had said that the vital problems of India “are being treated by His Majesty’s Government with neglect, even sometimes with hostility and contempt”.

While a starvation death is impossible to prove, it is worth noting the daily calorie intake of a tea garden worker is 203 while the ideal number stands at 2400, according to the NGO, Right to Food and Work.
Every tea estate employs around 2000 workers. Considering their families, close to 10,000 people depend on one tea estate. Tea workers here at the Birpara Tea Garden owned by the Duncan group have not been paid since March last year. The tea committees in each of the estates have employed some of the workers to pluck tea leaves for which they get eight rupees behind every kilo.

Neela Minj, one of the daily wage labourers here, says an exceptional day’s work translates into 100-120 rupees per day. Even the minimum wage under MNREGA is more than double the amount. “We have been working here for almost two decades,” she says, while masterfully plucking the tea leaves. Her hands moving in sync, as though a flight on an auto-pilot mode. “We have been permanent employees for all these years. But we can hardly look after our families these days.”

Clad in a beige shirt with a handkerchief strapped around the head, she says days, or sometimes, even weeks go by with the gas being untouched. “As per the law, we are entitled to our PF, gratuity and so on,” she says, her colleagues nod in agreement. “But it hardly translates on the ground. The attitude of the TMC government is depressingly similar to the previous Left Front, which is disillusioning.”

The tea gardens were rendered sick because of gross mismanagement on the part of the owners. Majumdar says the private owners made tremendous profits but they were siphoned off elsewhere instead of investing back in the North Bengal's tea gardens. "Their empire thrived on exploitation of workers," he says. "There was no proper financial planning or vision for the tea gardens."

However, the TMC government has been equally ineffective in bringing the owners to book. The centre, through a notification, tried to acquire the land on which the tea estates spread out like a trackless desert, but the state has challenged it in court since the land originally belongs to them. Workers complain they have been victims of political shadow boxing between state and centre, and neither of them seems serious in reopening the tea gardens. 

There are 12 constituencies in these two districts of Aliporeduar and Jalpaiguri surrounded by Tea Plantations, and when they go to polls on April 17, the tea worker would prove to be the pivotal chunk. 
Historically, this belt was a den of the Left. They still have strong trade unions in the area but the anti-incumbency of 35 years still resonates here. The alliance with the Congress could boost their chances, since most of the sitting MLAs belong to the two of them combined, but it is difficult to see them hold on to all of their seats.

Tarkeshwar Lohar, a bespectacled former communist party member, suggests the Left have become geriatric and need to be flexible if it wants to regain the lost ground to TMC. “They are still speaking about Marx and Lenin,” he says. “They do not have a youth leader. How will any youngster be attracted towards the party?” 

The locals here had been demanding a Hindi college for eternity. The Left did not heed the demand while Mamata Banerjee did it immediately in 2011 after coming to power. An IT college too is under construction. Plus, many of the villages have now become accessible. 

While travelling through the tea gardens with plants gazing and glittering from every nook and corner, one hardly comes across a red flag while TMC flags deluge the periphery. 

The BJP, interestingly, may not be a major player in other parts of West Bengal but in the Tea belt, it is a factor. The reason being the workers are divided among Tribals and Nepalis. The Tribals, who historically used to be with the Left, have shifted towards the TMC but the Nepali workers side with the BJP.  

Dinesh Kami of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha says the Nepali workers prefer BJP because Mamata has always neglected the whole community. “The TMC government may have replaced the Left but the tea workers’ penury has not gone anywhere,” he says, adding the BJP is the only viable option for them. “Moreover, TMC has never paid attention to our demands or ethnicity. Recently, Mamata converted 42 of our primary schools into Bangla medium schools.”

Robinson Kujar, president, Progressive Tea Worker’s Union, says Mamata’s work in education and infrastructural sector makes Tribals hopeful towards her. “She has provided scholarships to girls after 10th standard, provided bicycles to school kids,” he says. “The Tribal kids also want opportunities. They want to be first-generation students.”

The split is palpable but the number arithmetic gives TMC the edge. While Nepali workers are around 85,000 in this belt, Tribals make up to 3 lakh of them. Nonetheless, there is no denying the condition of tea workers is, if at all it can, only getting worse and if Mamata still enjoys an upper hand, it is because the 35-year misrule of Left still sends shivers down the spine of the electorate and compels them to be patient even while enduring famine, destitution and starvation.