Samaresh Majumdar is not enthusiastic at all about West Bengal election this year. The eminent Bengali writer can't get over the fact that hundreds of tea workers residing in his native Jalpaiguri in north Bengal are facing starvation.
"This election holds no importance for me if it fails to provide to these people the basic necessities of life," he told rediff.com. "It hurts me to see the families of tea garden workers who I grew up with suffering. It's a pity that the government is turning a blind eye to their woes. The government has not even tried to explore the reasons for this crisis. Those days are not far off when the tea industry in Bengal will suffer the same fate as the jute industry," Majumdar added.
As he tells tales of happy days when his grandfather and father used to work in a tea garden in Jaldapara, the writer appealed to the governments (state and Centre) to take necessary steps to improve the situation.
The question is: what led to the crisis in the tea industry? We spoke to several people and organisations to seek an answer. In mostly no-names-please conversations, these people opined that middlemen and the government were to blame for the dismal state of affairs.
"To know the cause, you need to go back to 1999," said a source. "The year marked the end of the 'boom' in the tea industry. Vast areas of North Bengal grow a particular variety of tea, which is consumed by the middle-class and lower middle-class," he said. Therefore, tea grown here always had a limited clientele.
Before 1999, tea garden owners were happy with the small profits they made. However, the sudden and unprecedented profits in tea ushered in huge short term investments from a new class of speculators.
This new breed was too greedy. They ensured that the entire surplus went into share markets and other trades. They refrained reinvesting in their tea estates.
"Essential tasks, such as pruning tea bushes, uprooting old bushes and expanding into new plantations were thrown out of the window," lamented Majumdar. The new trend not only affected the state of the workers but also told upon the quality of tea. "In the Dooras, Terai and Darjeeling region 90 per cent of the tea gardens are 80 to 100 years old. Productivity has come to a standstill because no one is sowing new plants," he adds.
A team of big producers-cum-brokers saw to it so that the auction prices were kept to a minimum causing a man-made 'crisis' in the tea market. Their goal was to flush out the conventional tea growers before taking over. Needless to say, they were successful.
The first group to bear the brunt was the small and middle planters. Initially they resorted to unfair means to make up their losses. This resulted in lock-outs at tea gardens and factories followed by the infamous starvation deaths of workers and their family members in the region.
"In fact, what the tea-brokers plan to do is bring the gardens to a defunct state so that they can sell the land later at a price, at least 10 times higher," says a former planter.
According to Majumdar, the towns of Siliguri and Jalpaiguri are gradually acquiring a swanky look, thanks to the mushrooming of shopping malls and retail marts. Most of them are built on tea garden land.
Amid this grim state of affairs, multinationals, quite expectedly, did not fail to use this opportunity to further their ends. A few years back, a tea major advertised in the local dailies offering lucrative prices for the crisis-ridden tea estates.
Though West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya went on rigorous campaigning in north Bengal, the tea industry crisis is causing him a major headache. As the threat of violence looms large over tea industry issue, the government has begun to look at the problem. It realises the plight of tea garden workers could spell disaster both for the government and the Left parties.
If the trade unions get aggressive with their demands for redress and take to the streets, it would be a blow to the chief minister's dream of bringing in foreign direct investment for the state's infrastructure development.
