The dark side of India’s tea
It’s the most popular drink in the world after water, but getting it into your cup still starts with a colonial system that keeps millions of ‘pluckers’ in a life of near slavery
WEST BENGAL, INDIA— Tea is sipped every day by billions of people.
Much of it comes from India, which provides 14 per cent of world tea exports and employs 3.5 million people in the industry: almost the entire population of Alberta.
India’s tea reaches every corner of the planet, packed inside the cheap, instant tea bags found on supermarket shelves as well as in the classy wooden boxes of Darjeeling, the world’s most expensive tea.
But 68 years after India became independent, its tea garden workers still live under the remnants of an indentured labour system established by British colonialists in the mid-19th century.
Most of the workers are women employed as pluckers, often the direct descendants of the bonded labourers brought into the gardens more than a century ago. Their living conditions mirror those of their predecessors.
Hosted in isolated colonies lost amid the country’s 1,500 plantations, workers earn less than $2 (U.S.) per day and depend upon tea companies for everything, from food and water to health facilities, schools and electricity.
They inhabit houses owned by the companies, and they can be expelled from the estates if another family member doesn’t take over picking responsibilities when the older generation retires.
‘So many tears’
With its endless rows of trimmed, dark green bushes, tea estates exude an air of peace. Women work silently, plucking the upper, golden green leaves and placing them in net bags hanging from their heads. Managers dress in Bermuda shorts in homage to British traditions, their whitewashed residences completing the postcardlike look of an idyll.
Yet, a few hundred metres from their offices and the adjoining processing factories stands the truth of a sometimes pitiless industry.
Decrepit houses with no toilets line the colonies’ unpaved roads. Schools are staffed with one or two teachers for hundreds of pupils, with children ferried like cattle in the same trailers used to transport tea leaves.
Hospitals are often nothing more than a couple of stinking, dirty wards equipped with a few wooden beds and a dispensary whose shelves are empty.
“There are so many tears behind the tea we drink every day,” says Victor Basu, the leader of Dooars Jagron, an association assisting tea workers in the eastern India’s state of West Bengal, one of the country’s main tea-producing area.
Home to 276 tea estates split among the regions of Terai, Dooars and Darjeeling, the state is infamous for poor working conditions. Here, a 2013 government survey found that only 61estates had proper drinking water,107 didn’t have hospitals and 44 had no latrines, all services that tea companies are obliged to provide by law.
Almost 96,000 out of 262,000 workers had not been provided housing, while 35 tea estates were behind on wages and 41 had not deposited any funds for their workers’ retirement. Several other workers were classified as “sick,” or struggling financially.
“Tea workers in West Bengal are deprived of the minimum of the minimum,” says Abhijit Mazumdar, president of the Terai Struggling Tea Workers Union.
“They are kept in this condition on purpose, in order to provide the industry with cheap labour.”
But for many pickers, the only thing worse than working on the plantations is not working on the plantations. If tea companies default, their gardens can close overnight, leaving workers with no wages, water or food, literally starving to death. According to local NGOs, more than 2,000 tea workers have died of malnutrition in the past 15 years.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, India’s tea sector has been ravaged by cyclical crises caused by underinvestment, interna- tional competition and poor management. Some estates have not invested in planting new tea bushes for more than 100 years, causing yields to plummet.
In the mid 2000s, when the industry experienced its worst crisis, 14 tea gardens closed. Seven are still shut, affecting 5,000 workers and their families, a total of 25,000 people.
Although the government has recently stepped in, providing closed estates’ workers with food, water and basic health services, reopening the gardens would mean uprooting entire sections of old, unproductive tea bushes and replacing them with new plants, a costly proposition that scares off most potential investors.
Meanwhile, workers cannot afford to
move elsewhere and start a new life. They have no savings and migrating would mean losing their right to the house and the job if gardens reopen.
While waiting hopelessly, many fall prey to human traffickers who swarm the closed gardens, luring youngsters to other parts of India with false promises of good jobs and money.