Bengal's tea gardens: A sad tale of misery

The sorry tale of how the operating managing committees, the state-supported worker committees who were to manage tea estates in West Bengal after their exhausted owners gave up and instead ran these into the ground, while pocketing the money, has been reported in some detail. But, what of the body of workers themselves?

How do they get on under this regime?

Just about, in these closed tea gardens, it would seem. They fight all odds to live. They have a roof over their heads -- their ramshackle quarters -- but no electricity or drinking water is available for them.

At the Kathalguri Estate with which we began, after much agitation the district administration did arrange for 11 hand pumps in the garden, but only two of these are working now. "Every day we have to walk two km to fetch water," said members of a self-help group of the women in the garden.

In the plucking season, the OMC provides the employees with three days of work a week at the rate of Rs 50. The government provides the workers seven kg of foodgrain per head, at the same rate it provides to below poverty Line  cardholders.

A panchayat has also started functioning in the tea garden areas.

But, admits Anima Munda, a worker at Kathalguri and member of the Camacho gram panchayat, very little could be offered under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. For example, in August, those at Kathalguri got work for all of seven days.

And, the wages have been left unpaid for months, defeating the very purpose of NREGS.

Kathalguri's hospital death register tells the real story. More than 500 people have died from the garden over the past seven years.

While malnutrition, anaemia, blood dysentery, fever, etc were mentioned in some cases as the cause, in most cases no specific reason for death has been recorded.

Subrata Sarkar, a social worker who took upon himself the task of monitoring the conditions of life in closed tea gardens, claims  there were at least 150 hunger-related deaths in Kathalguri.

The Paschim Banga Yuba Kalyan Manch, an NGO working with the hapless garden families, points to the lack of potable water as a major factor, coupled with the inadequate food intake, to make the workers and their kin disease-prone.

After much persuasion by the PBYKM, the state public health engineering department had agreed to sink a deep tubewell in the garden. But, it didn't happen, since the OMC did not like the 'interference' by the NGO.