How a health crisis is brewing in Assam

: On the morning of February 26, Janki Rawtia woke up feeling uneasy. The 36-year-old had no history of any serious ailment and no reason to think death was near.

“I told her not to go to work,” Ratan Nayak, her husband, who also works at Doyang Tea Estate in Assam’s Golaghat district as a “faltu” (temporary worker) says, sitting on the courtyard of his tworoom mud house in Tongi Line, a cluster of quarters for workers. Rawtia stayed back. “She watched TV, ate bhaat (rice), but when she was about to go to sleep in the evening, she started sweating profusely,” Nayak recalls.

The panicked husband ran to fetch an ambulance. The pharmacist at the tea garden’s hospital, a 10-minute walk, told Nayak that Rawtia’s blood pressure was low and referred her to the civil hospital in Golaghat town, a drive of about 30 minutes. The Doyang hospital has a pharmacist and a nurse. A doctor visits twice a week on Mondays and Fridays, when most workers are out in the plantations.

Rawtia died on her way to Golaghat. “She passed away even before we could get to the hospital,” Nayak says.

A few houses away across the road, Ajay Sobor is yet to come out of the shock of his mother Durgi Sobor’s sudden death on February 27. She would hang out with Rawtia on most days. On February 27, she had gone to Rawtia’s house after coming to know of her death.

“After she came back, she too complained of uneasiness,” recalls Ajay, another temporary worker at Doyang. Durgi, too, was referred to the civil hospital in Golaghat. “My mother passed away as we were entering the hospital.”

Between February 9 and March 16, Doyang saw 20 deaths, including that of a two-year-old girl. Six of them died on February 12 and February 13, seven people passed away between February 24 and February 27, leaving the 3,500 people in the plantation in a state of disbelief.

Nayak complains that the tea garden management did nothing to investigate the deaths. “There was no postmortem, no attempt to find out if there was any virus causing the deaths,” he says.

Rajat Das is the manager at Doyang, one of the six plantations owned by Grob Tea Company, run by the Rawalwasia group. It is the lone loss-making garden of the group, which claims to produce 4million kilograms of Assam tea a year.

“Nobody died at the estate hospital,” he says, pulling out a sheaf of papers.

Rajat had an explanation for the death of Sunaina Nayak, a two-and-a-half-yearold girl, who died mysteriously too. “She had a lot of worms. They came out of her nose and mouth,” he says.

“Others mostly died of drinking toxic liquor,” he says and brings out a report submitted by officials of the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme who had visited the tea estate.

The report blames toxic alcohol and existing diseases such as tuberculosis and hypertension causing “damage to the organs” and leading to their death.

“They would mix battery chemicals and urea in the liquor,” Das says, pointing to vessels at an abandoned unit for brewing “chulai”, a highly intoxicating local alcohol. But he has yet to file a first information report against the owner of the “bhaati”, or illegal distillery.

Workers contest the management’s theories. Ratan Nayak is aghast at the chulai accusation. “Both of us (Nayak and his late wife) are followers of Sree Sree Thakur Anukulchandra (a Bengali spiritual guru). We do not eat meat or drink alcohol,” he says. “Janki wouldn’t have died if there was a doctor,” he says.

The Assam Plantation Labour Rules make it mandatory for tea gardens employing more than 500 workers to have a decently equipped hospital or have a lien on beds of a neighbouring hospital.

Yet, Doyang has none, despite a decent hospital building. “Most hospitals on the gardens run as referral points,” says Ghanshyam Bhahoi, president of the Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangh’s Golaghat chapter.

Data for the first quarter of 2017 with the labour commissioner’s office in Assam says only 343 of 800 tea gardens

SIP ON THIS Around 50% of tea gardens have abysmal health facilities. Patients mostly have to be ferried on handcarts to clinics GOLAGHAT/GUWAHATI