WHERE DEATH STALKS
have a full-time medical practitioner, even when there are as many as 469 plantations with a permanent workforce of 500 or above.
The situation is worse on the smaller gardens. At Hatigarh Matikhula Tea Estate, workers complain that patients are ferried on handcarts to the garden’s clinic because there is no vehicle available. And if they are referred to the civil hospital in Golaghat, they are mostly forced to rent a vehicle, which could cost as much as their weekly wage.
“There are no tea gardens that are following the rules properly,” says Rimjim Gogoi, the labour inspector in Golaghat.
Asked about the deaths at Doyang, she says the district does not have a medical inspector for plantations to check facilities on tea gardens. Of the eight sanctioned posts for inspectors, six are vacant in Assam, leaving thousands of permanent and temporary tea garden workers at the mercy of the management. There is a shortfall of another 20 labour inspectors in the state. “We are neither trained nor equipped to keep a check,” says Gogoi, the lone labour inspector for 55 tea gardens in Golaghat subdivision in 2017.
She had an alibi when asked if she visited Doyang after the deaths. The district was functioning without an assistant labour commissioner. It is only recently that the assistant labour commissioner of neighbouring Nagaon has been given the charge. He is yet to distribute the 55 tea gardens among two inspectors.
Assam’s part-time labour commissioner Tapan Sarma, who also serves as the secretary at the personnel department, says the department needs to be reorganised and that a high-level committee had been formed to look into it. It is yet to submit its report.
The state government has found that sanitation and health facilities in some tea plantations are abysmal and workers are susceptible to treatable ailments such as tuberculosis, anaemia, hypertension and leprosy. The maternal mortality rate in Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar, Jorhat and Golaghat — the Upper Assam districts with a large concentration of tea plantations — was 404 deaths per 100,000 live births, according to the governmentcommissioned Annual Health Survey of 2012-13. The national rate is 167 deaths for 100,000 live births.
“There are as many as 50% tea gardens that have abysmal health facilities. And to make inroads into these areas we came up with mobile medical units (MMUs),” says Mukul Chandra Gogoi, the state’s health secretary. Over 80 MMUs visit 240 tea gardens five days every month.
“We cannot build hospitals, so this is a way to ensure hospital comes to them,” says AC Baisya, executive director of the National Health Mission in Assam. He, however, conceded that this is a stop-gap measure.
The National Health Mission has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with 250 tea gardens under which the plantations are required to provide vehicles to serve as ambulance and pay ₹7.5 lakh a year to take care of a part of the expenses of staff salaries and drugs at medical facilities of tea estates.
But 100 MoUs, including the one with Doyang, were terminated after these gardens failed to comply with the NHM requirements and withdrew their share of expenses.
“Only continuous, sustainable health delivery is the solution,” Baisya says. The latest government scheme of providing ₹12,000 to pregnant tea garden workers will help in the long run, he says.
In another long-term solution, officials say the government plans to open primary health centres in tea gardens. The project will kick off with 15 Assam Tea Corporation Ltd gardens. But the success of failure of this project, too, would depend on the support from private tea gardens.