A month after a Central Minister visited the State’s tea gardens and mounted pressure on improving the lot of the workers, the West Bengal government on Thursday passed a Bill which creates a Rs 100 crore corpus aimed at prodding owners to modernise closed and sick tea gardens, while offering incentives to invest in workers’ welfare.
With Assembly elections scheduled in 2016, the tea industry and 11.2 lakh people directly involved in it are clearly the focus of both the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre and the Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal.
It may be mentioned that Union Minister of State for Commerce Nirmala Sitharaman during her May visit to two sick tea gardens in North Bengal, and during the stake-holders meeting later, had flagged the issue of minimum wages. She had also expressed concern over the condition of tea garden workers, saying that a report needs to be prepared on their actual plight.
The Minster had said that she would write to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on the issue of sick tea gardens. Close on the heels of that visit, the government passed the West Bengal Tea Plantation Employees’ Welfare Fund which offers soft loan to present or new owners of sick and closed tea gardens to egg them to rejuvenate the estates. It also offers soft loan to tea gardens for taking up schemes for workers’ welfare and basic amentities.
A third component of the Bill takes a leaf out of the recent 12th plan announcement on tea, where education loans and scholarships have been offered for workers’ children.
West Bengal is India’s second largest tea-growing State after Assam, accounting for a quarter of India’s 1100 million kg tea output . There are 283 registered gardens in Darjeeling, Dooars amd Terai.
The able-bodied have gone elsewhere for work abandoning the old and the infirm in these estates. Several Central and state-sponsored welfare schemes are now being run in these gardens.
