Improving the lives of tea garden workers in West Bengal

Image © Oak Foundation

In the far north of West Bengal, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, lies the famous town of Darjeeling. Surrounded by 20,000 hectares of neatly growing tea gardens, a staggering 10 million kilograms of organic tea are grown in this region every year.

The origins of the tea gardens date back to the 19th century. Under British colonial rule, thousands of Nepalese and Bhutanese workers from the Himalayan region, and Indigenous people from the tribal heartland of eastern central India, moved to work in the tea gardens across the five districts of the northern part of West Bengal. Today, they employ well over one million permanent and temporary workers across the country.⁽¹⁾

When they first arrived in the region, tea garden workers cleared thick forests, planted thousands of tea bushes, and built settlements for themselves on the grounds of the tea gardens, including houses, schools, and creches. Tea garden owners agreed that workers could live there and have access to the facilities, as long as they worked for the tea gardens. Today, some 150 years later, many of the descendants of the original tea workers still live in these settlements.

However, times have changed, and the tea market is not as lucrative.⁽²⁾ The share of Indian tea in the international market is declining, and higher than normal temperatures and unusual rainfall patterns due to climate change, as well as ageing tea bushes, are affecting the quality of the tea. “This is greatly impacting the lives of the people who have made their living off the tea gardens for generations,” says Paromita Chowdhury, programme officer for the India Programme.

Based on this decline in demand for and quality of tea, many of the tea gardens have closed, but the people continue to live there. In many cases, the workers continue to maintain the tea gardens independently. They sell the tea directly to local distribution factories, often for more money than they would earn if the gardens were still open. However, once the gardens close, the workers no longer have access to benefits such as healthcare, housing maintenance, or pensions. And, they do not have a legal right to their land either, despite the fact they and their families have lived there for nearly two centuries.

In addition, many of the workers are unable to access government aid and essential services that they are entitled to, including subsidised food supplies, safe and secure housing, drinking water, healthcare, education, and social security services. “This is often due to a lack of awareness and incorrect identity documents,” says Indranil Niyogi, programme officer for the India Programme. “This is why we are supporting not-for-profit organisations working in the West Bengal area to help register people so that they can access their entitlements, even if the tea gardens close.”

In recent years, there have been some great victories for the tea garden communities and workers in the informal sector in India. There has been a surge in worker benefits and social entitlements for informal workers in the tea, construction, garment, handloom, and domestic work sector. For the first time, domestic workers secured mandatory paid holidays and annual wage hikes.

This is thanks to the work of several Oak partners. For example, Swaniti Initiatives is a not-for-profit organisation that works with local partners to provide technical assistance to state and local governments in West Bengal. This helps ensure that tea worker communities can access fair wages, tea garden-specific entitlements, and benefits. By working with the district administration, Swaniti has helped facilitate identity documents for 10,500 tea garden workers. In addition, community outreach work has helped inform the workers of their entitlements, which has helped increase overall registration for government entitlement schemes.

“For the last ten years, Swaniti, through its local partner organisation, has been working with the government, civil society organisations, and communities to see how access to schemes can be made better,” says Gaurav Bhattacharya, chief operating officer at Swaniti Initiatives.

In addition, our partner Transform Trade works to help strengthen 9,000 tea worker communities from five districts of Assam and West Bengal. “Transform Trade works with local partners, tea companies, communities, the government, and trade-related agencies to improve working and living conditions for tea garden workers,” says Chitralekha Chowdhury, programme manager of Gender & Policy at Transform Trade. “In this way, they and their families can enjoy economic self-reliance and social security benefits.”

The West Bengal Right to Food and Work Network works to ensure that the legal commitments under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013 are understood by people so that they can request the state to deliver on these commitments. The NFSA is an Indian Act of Parliament that aims to provide subsidised food grains to approximately two-thirds of the country’s 1.4 billion people. The network operates in 20 out of the 23 districts of West Bengal state, including in the tea garden region in the north.

A Supreme Court case has been ongoing since 2006, in the hope of securing payment for tea garden workers who have not been paid. To date, the workers have still not received what they are due. In 2018, the network supported the workers from closed tea gardens in two tea-growing districts to access interim relief of USD 2.2 million dollars, after a Supreme Court order for partial payment of unpaid wages.

In addition, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the network helped thousands of migrant workers to return safely to their villages in Bengal and also monitored the distribution of free grain and other entitlements under the NFSA. At present, network members are actively working to bring attention to the right to land of tea garden workers.

Video Volunteers work to support community members to produce video content that highlights the prevalent issues of their communities and regions. “The work of the community content creators has been really important in giving a platform to showcase our issues and concerns,” says Manzil Tapa, a tea garden worker in Darjeeling.

These efforts are supported by Oak’s India Programme, which funds efforts to sustainably improve the lives of marginalised people in West Bengal, including unorganised workers, Indigenous communities known as Adivasis, and adult and child migrants. We focus on the tea gardens of North Bengal and the Sundarbans coastal region, which face a range of climate-related and other challenges, where marginalised communities are found in greater numbers. Click here to learn more about our India programme. Watch the video below to find out more about our partners’ work.

References
¹ PIB Delhi, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Tea Gardens https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1578137 
² Economic and Politic Weekly, Not Our Cup of Tea Anymore? Emerging Trends from Trade https://www.epw.in/journal/2023/39/commentary/not-our-cuptea-anymore.html