Deliberations over the recent deaths in the tea gardens of North Bengal may remind one of the Japanese film Rasho¯mon . As in the 1950s masterpiece, death in Rasho¯mon and the tea gardens will be remembered for the differing accounts of witnesses. While the unions claim the workers are starving, the management of the closed gardens disagree, thus refusing to appropriately increase the daily wages. The government willy-nilly accepts the problem but denies starvation deaths. Meanwhile, one of the reports suggested that 60 per cent (136) of the people had a Body Mass Index (BMI) lower than the critical value of 18.5 in a closed garden, surveyed by health professionals like Dr. Binayak Sen. Of these 136 chronically under-nourished adults, 37 had a BMI below 16, that is, their nutritional status in itself constituted a risk to life. According to WHO recommendations, any community that has more than 40 per cent of its members with BMI levels below 18.5 should be considered as “a starving community”. A report by the West Bengal Labour Department published earlier this year concluded that the workers are acutely exploited. The report said that in scores of gardens the managements do not provide for the maintenance of the workers and their families, thus flouting the Plantations Labour Act of 1951. Of the workers, 36 per cent have not been provided with housing. Out of 273 tea estates, only 166 have hospitals and only 56 of those hospitals have full-time residential doctors, while eight gardens have stopped paying wages. Managements have not made provision for provident fund, bonus or gratuity in many gardens. However, many estates are doing well, indicating that tea planting is still a profitable business a quarter-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was the main buyer of Indian tea.
Then there are the ‘sick’ tea estates. The owners of such gardens argue that wage enhancement is “impractical” as business is slow. The workers are mandated to get a daily wage of just Rs.95 — much less than the daily agricultural wage — on condition that the garden owners provide facilities such as housing, education and health care. Such maintenance was made mandatory as the tribals of central India were once uprooted to work in tea plantations. So, payment of maintenance is legally binding and the argument of business going belly-up should cut no ice. Such owners, who have groomed their gardens poorly for a windfall profit and stopped paying wages, should be brought to book and forced to clear the dues through appropriate legal action. But neither the settlement of dues nor appropriate wage escalation is likely in the near future unless the plight of the tea garden workers receives urgent and serious attention from the governments concerned.
