TEA PLANTATION LABOUR

Living Conditions of
Tea Plantation Workers
Sharit K Bhowmik

The strike by women workers

in the tea plantations of Kerala
brings to fore the miserable
living conditions of the workers
in this sector across the country.
With more than a million
permanent workers, the tea
plantation industry is the largest
in the formal private sector in
the country. Yet wages of these
workers are the lowest in the
formal sector and their living
conditions are appalling. Though
there are laws that govern the
living conditions of workers, these
are violated and the state seems
indifferent.

he recent strike by plantation

workers in Kerala was the first of
its kind in many ways. The strike
was pre-empted by a spontaneous movement of women workers who struck
work on their own. They did not allow
the male workers or the existing trade
unions to interfere. Though the women
demanded an increase in daily wages to
Rs 500, their main demand was to
improve the living conditions of the
labour lines in the plantations. This movement was started by women workers of
Kanan Devan Tea Plantations, which is a
part of Tata Global Beverages (for a detailed account, see in this issue Munnar:
Through the Lens of Political Ecology).
What is especially interesting is that a
majority of the shareholders of this plantation company are workers. The company was owned by Tata Tea. It decided
to make their workers the owners. Yet it
is surprising that the workerowners
should strike against the holding company. We will come to this later.
Question of Wages

Sharit K Bhowmik (sharitb@gmail.com) is a

sociologist and is at present adjunct faculty
at Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Contemporary
Studies, University of Mumbai.
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

The employers associations in the plantations are unhappy not merely because
they need to pay more to their workers
but they are worried about the effect of
this strike on plantations in the other
tea-growing states, namely Tamil Nadu,
West Bengal and Assam. The wage rates
of the two eastern states (Assam and
West Bengal) are the lowest in the country and they would not even be subsistence wages for workers in informal
employment. These two states produce
75% of the countrys tea and engage
around the same proportion of permanent
workers. Daily wages in West Bengal are
Rs 122.50 and in Assam the state government has set the minimum wage at
Rs 146 per day. Permanent workers in tea
plantations number over one million,
vol l nos 46 & 47

making this industry the largest employer

in the organised private sector. In fact,
one of the main grouses of the employers is that they need to abide by the laws
that govern the organised sector workers such as the Industrial Disputes Act,
Factories Act, Provident Fund and Gratuity Act and others.
The Plantations Labour Act (PLA) is
an extremely important act for plantation workers because its provisions tend
to improve the cultural and social lives
of these workers who are isolated and
cut off from the world outside the plantation. Given the fact that plantations
are isolated and labour engaged may
not have access to basic human facilities, the act makes it mandatory for
employers to provide housing to their
workers and their families, sanitation
facilities and provision of potable water
in the labour lines, canteens with subsidised food, crches, primary schools
and hospitals, including group medical
hospitals for specialist treatment. The
plantation associations have complained that these are too heavy a burden for them. However, it is quite well
known that most of these provisions are
never implemented so the costs involved for their implementation claimed
by the planters are purely speculative.
The non-implementation of acts is
mainly because of the indifference of
the state governments and of course the
plantation companies.
Living in Poverty
Studies on working and living conditions of tea plantation labour show that
they have been very bad right from the
time the industry began in the mid-19th
century right to the present. All plantation workers are migrants whose forefathers had migrated to work on plantations mainly due to poverty in their
places of origin. The plantation workers
in Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and the plains
of Darjeeling District are mainly from
the tribal communities of originating in
Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya
Pradesh, workers in the plantations of
Assam too originate from the same areas.
Workers in the plantations of Darjeeling
29

TEA PLANTATION LABOUR

hills originate from Nepal. Their forefathers had migrated to the plantations in
search of better life but in reality, as earlier reports show, it was a move from the
frying pan to the fire.
The Dooars Enquiry Committee of
1911 found that housing and water supply
were generally very poor. There was
inadequate space for housing and plinths
were not provided. The Royal Commission on Labour, 1931 also levelled the
same charge. R G Griffin, Special Officer
for Hookworms in Mines and Tea Plantations in Bengal, made the following
observation in 1920:
Ordinary thatched or some tin roof huts are
provided. They are generally overcrowded
owing to insufficiency of accommodation in
comparison with the number of people living in them. The houses are not laid out with
any idea as to utilising sunlight for drying
the immediate surroundings and plinths do
not exist or are insufficient. In many cases
where water is scarce and deep wells have to
be sunk, labour tends to become congested,
as coolies houses are congregated in the
immediate neighbourhood.

On water and sanitation, Griffin

observed that workers had to rely on rivers
or natural springs or wells for their water
supply. Wells were of two types, pucca
(with cemented sides) and kuchcha
(without cemented sides). The latter were
generally badly maintained. Plinths, if
present, were in dilapidated condition and
the puddled area around the wells would
invariably overflow into the well. This
presented a health hazard as many of the
cholera epidemics are traceable to uncontrolled water-supply being infected.
Conservancy was nil and he observed that
there is hardly any drainage system and
no latrine system exists. The workers used
the garden area as their easing grounds.
Eighteen years later, in 1938, the planters
association again admitted that sanitation in the tea gardens was rather
primitive but was being improved.1
Even after the PLA came into force,
the situation remained more or less the
same. The PLA laid down that 8% of
houses in the plantation must be converted to permanent houses every year.
These houses should have walls of brick
and mortar with roofs of tile or corrugated iron. These houses should be repaired
regularly and must be whitewashed
30

every two years. The other clauses lay

down that the labour lines must have
piped water or water could be kept in
covered cement water tank for a group
of houses. There must be toilets and
bathrooms separately for male and female workers. In most plantations in
West Bengal and Assam they do not
exist as workers and their families bathe
in the public water sources or go to the
streams. They use the forested area near
the plantation or the plantation area to
defecate and urinate.
A study of tea plantation labour in
West Bengal, Assam and Tamil Nadu in
1996 (Bhowmik et al 1996) shows that
the living conditions in West Bengal and
Assam have not changed since the prePLA days. Houses were in a shambles as
managements refused to repair them.
Workers had to fix leaking ceilings and
damaged walls with their meagre
resources. There were still no toilets or
bathing places and the workers and
their families used the tea plantation
area to defecate. Water remained a
problem as most plantations did not
have facilities for supplying water to the
labour lines. Though the PLA makes it
mandatory to have primary schools, in
most cases they were in a mess. There
was only one teacher to teach all four
classes. In other plantations, schools
were badly maintained.
Starvation Deaths
The present situation has not improved.
On the contrary, it has deteriorated. The
new phase of deterioration started at the
beginning of this century when several
tea plantations in West Bengal started to
close down. The plantation companies
claimed that they faced losses over the
years and they abandoned their plantations. Since tea plantations are the main
source of sustenance for the tea workers,
closure of the plantations would mean no
income or food. As a result, since 2000
several thousand tea workers or their
family members have reportedly died due
to starvation. There are varying estimates
of starvation deaths ranging from 1,200
to 1,800 during the period 20002015
(Chaudhuri 2015). All these people are
from the 17 closed tea plantations in
Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar Districts.
NOVEMBER 21, 2015

The Paschim Banga Khet Majoor

Samity (PBKMS) along with International
Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF),
a global federation of workers in plantations, tobacco, food, restaurant and beverages, filed a case in the Supreme Court
on the mismanagement in the plantations leading to deaths of workers. The
Court appointed Anuradha Talwar, President of PBKMS, as the West Bengal Advisor to the Commissioners of the Supreme
Court. The study by the West Bengal
Network on the Right to Food and Work,
which Talwar was associated with, found
that besides starvation and hunger in the
closed tea gardens, there were cases of
stripping the plantations of their assets
before the management fled secretly.
Employers had not deposited even the
workers dues with the provident fund
commissioner, sometime from 1997 onwards, let alone their own contributions.
These amounted to thousands of crores of
rupees. The law states that if employers
fail to deposit employees provident contribution (which is deducted from their
wages) it should be tried as a criminal
act. This actually amounts to theft of the
workers wage. Yet no criminal case was
filed by the provident fund authorities in
the state. The Supreme Court directed
the state government to take action
against the employers for the violations
that included starvation deaths. The
state government coolly stated that not a
single worker had died of starvation.
They had all died of natural causes.
A documentary made in 2008 on the
pathetic situation of tea workers in West
Bengal shows how no one in government really cares. At one point in the
interview with Jairam Ramesh, the then
Commerce Minister, he asks why such a
hue and cry is raised when only 16 of the
1,500 tea plantations in the country have
closed down. The fact that 1,500 workers in these plantations have died of
starvation did not stir his conscience.2
Farce of Worker Ownership
We can now turn to the strange case of
worker-ownership that has been put
forth by the Tata group of plantations.
The strike in Kerala was initiated by
women workers in one such group of
plantations. In 2005, the plantations
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Economic & Political Weekly

TEA PLANTATION LABOUR

owned by Tata Plantations converted itself into Amalgamated Plantations Private Limited (APPL). The idea was to
make workers of the tea gardens (controlled by the company) as major shareholders of the company. Tata invited the
International Finance Corporation (IFC)
of the World Bank to be a partner. APPL
owns 24 plantations in Assam and West
Bengal while its South Indian counterpart is Kanan Devan with 17 tea plantations. Tata Global Beverages controls
28.52% of the shares of Kanan Devan
which has now become an associate
company of Tata Global Beverages (Dutt
2013). IFC owns 20% of the shares in both
companies while Tata Global Beverages
has 49.66% shares in APPL. The rest are
owned by the workers of the plantations.
Though workers have purchased shares,
or they were forced to purchase them by
the company, they have no control over
the plantations nor do they have any say
in their management.
A report on APPL published by the
Columbia Law School Human Rights
Institute in 2013 exposes the hoax of
ownership.3 The workers have no control
over the company and their living and
working conditions are no different from
the other plantation workers. In short
pathetic. APPL proudly claims that the
scheme of worker-ownership was introduced by Tata as a voluntary measure and
it has been totally successful. But the report has a different story. The plantation
managers forced workers to buy shares.
They had to put their thumb impression
on the agreement paper (since most are
illiterate) and later Rs 4550 was deducted
from their wages every month to pay for
the value of the shares. When workers in
one of the tea plantations protested,
they were warned by the manager that
he would declare a lockout and they
would lose their wages. In another case,
the officials turned off the weighing machine when workers went to weigh the
leaves they had plucked. They were told
that their leaves would be weighed only
after they put their thumb impression on
the share applications.
The Columbia Law School report provides details of the living conditions of
the workers in 15 of the plantations. The
toilets were unusable as they were never
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

cleaned, there was hardly any drainage

and houses were in dilapidated conditions. Most workers living in the permanent quarters were provided electricity
connections, but the charges were very
high amounting to almost one-third of
what they earned. The plantation workers in Assam and West Bengal were provided rations of foodgrains amounting
to one kilo of rice and 2.25 kilos of wheat
per head per week. Unemployed children below 18 years and spouses too
were provided these rations. This is a
part of the workers wage and if the
worker is absent the proportionate
amount is deducted.4 The report notes
that in most APPL plantations, only the
male workers were provided rations for
their dependents. Female workers got
rations only for themselves. This put a
lot of strain on the finances of femaleheaded households, but the management seemed indifferent. If these are the
conditions prevailing in gardens run by
the Tata group, what could be the conditions in other tea plantations?
Without Basic Services
I have visited several plantations in
West Bengal during the past two years
(201315) and I found that the main issues
before the workers are wages and rations.
When workers in a plantation tell you
that they have no problems, they mean
that they get their wages and rations on
time. These workers see their counterparts in other plantations near them are
worse off as they do not get their wages
on time and the managements frequently skip providing rations. However a look
at the labour lines gives a different picture.
There is lack of proper housing, sanitation and drainage. Water was a major
problem. In one of the so-called properly
functioning plantations in Alipurduar, I
found that piped water was provided to
workers once a fortnight. In other cases,
piped water was provided on alternate
days or every week.
In other plantations, wages and rations
were paid irregularly. These are paid either
weekly or fortnightly. The managements
frequently fail to pay wages on time. In
most cases, the weekly wage is paid
after one or two weeks. In this way the
plantation falls behind in payments. It
vol l nos 46 & 47

was not unusual for workers to tell me

that the management had paid their
weekly wage after a fortnight. In some
cases, they were given advances. In case
of rations, the situation is even worse.
Many plantations gave a weeks rations
after a month or so and they were
behind payment by 24 to 25 weeks. In
one plantation, the workers were to
receive 52 weeks of rations.
One of the largest plantation companies in West Bengal, Duncans, owned by
the Gauri Goenka group has at the time
of writing stopped paying its workers.
This company has 21 tea plantations in
the three districts (Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar
and Darjeeling) and it claimed that work
was going on, though workers were not
being paid. This has affected the fates of
over 20,000 workers. There seems to be
no solution in sight as neither the state
government nor the trade unions have
managed to bring the employers to
discuss the issue.
Kerala, West Bengal and Assam
The situation in plantations in Kerala is
almost similar in terms of living conditions. Till about 15 years ago, the conditions in the southern tea-growing states
(Kerala and Tamil Nadu) had a much
better record of implementing the PLA.
This has deteriorated considerably over
the past few years even though wages are
higher in these states compared to Assam
and West Bengal. Wages in Kerala are high
compared to the two northern states and
though the wage offered by the employers
(Rs 301) is much lower than the prevailing daily wage in the state which is over
Rs 500. The higher wages have attracted
thousands of workers and their children
from tea plantations in Assam and West
Bengal to migrate to Kerala not merely
to work in tea or coffee plantations, but
also as construction workers and assistants in shops or small eating places.
There are many differences between
Kerala and the two northern states.
Though the trade unions are quite widespread in all these states, they have not
been effective. In West Bengal, the problem is of multiple trade unions. This has
weakened the workers bargaining power.
In Assam, the main trade union owes
allegiance to Indian National Trade Union
31

TEA PLANTATION LABOUR

Congress (INTUC) and has had a reputation of being soft on employers. Kerala
too faced similar problems but the
women workers decided to act on their
own and they achieved positive results.
The other point is that the state government too has taken a positive view of the
workers problems. In the case of West
Bengal, the state governments (in the
past and present) did not even consider
seriously the problems faced by workers
who were systematically deprived of the
rights. The governments tried to deny
that there were deaths due to starvation
or that there were cases of malnutrition.
In fact, they celebrated the paltry increases in wages as landmark developments. The poor educational facilities
ensure that the only future workers and
the children have is of unskilled labour.
The workers and their families in the
tea plantations of Assam are in some
ways worse off than the others. The permanent workers number a little more
than 5,00,000 and the total population
of these workers would easily be five
times more. The tea plantation workers
in West Bengal are a part of the Scheduled Tribes (ST) but in Assam the people

of similar origins are denied this status.

Being ST would mean availing of free
educational facilities and later reservation in employment among other facilities provided by the state. The plantation workers in Assam have been struggling for ST status, but the state government has refused this so far. This has
deprived them of any form of protective
discrimination which is absolutely necessary for their development.
The problems of plantation workers
are mainly due to the indifference of the
governments, both state and centre, to
their basic needs as human beings. The
plantation companies too are equally to
blame for creating this situation. The
workers organisations, the trade unions,
are largely controlled by leaders who are
not from the community and cannot reflect
the aspirations of these workers. After
several years of oppression and marginalisation, the female workers in Kerala
took up the challenge of defending their
rights to live a decent life. They depended
neither on the largesse of state or the
outside trade union leaders for assisting
their cause. On the contrary, they created
the movement through their collective

strength and their labour power. This

could be the only way these marginalised
workers can assert their claims for decent
work and the right to live with dignity.
Notes
1 The conditions of living in earlier phase is taken
from Chapter 2 of my book (Bhowmik 1980).
2 A review of this documentary can be found in
EPW, 28 February 2009, Politics of Tea in the
Dooars.
3 The main writers of this report are Peter
Rosenblum and Ashwini Sukthankar.
4 For more details on wages of tea plantation
workers, see Bhowmik (2015).

References
Bhowmik, Sharit (1980): Class Formation in the
Plantation System (New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House).
(2015): Wages of Tea Plantation Workers,
EPW, 9 May.
Bhowmik, Sharit, V Xaxa and M A Kalam (1996):
Tea Plantation Labour in India (New Delhi:
Friedrich Ebert Foundation).
Chaudhuri, Mohuya (2015): Tea Gardens in the
East Are Brewing Starvation, Malnutrition,
The Wire, http://thewire.in/2015/07/30/teagardens-in-the-east-are-brewing-starvation-malnutrition-7571/, accessed on 31 July 2015.
Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute (2013):
The More Things Change The World Bank, Tata
and Enduring Abuses on Indias Tea Plantations
(New York: The World Bank).
Dutt, Ishita Ayan (2013): Tata Global Buys 10.59%
More in Kanan Devan, Business Standard,New
Delhi,6 July.

Women and Work

Edited by

Padmini Swaminathan
The notion of work and employment for women is complex. In India, fewer women participate in employment compared
to men. While economic factors determine mens participation in employment, womens participation depends on
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The introduction talks of the oppression faced by wage-earning women due to patriarchal norms and capitalist relations
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This volume analyses the concept of work, the economic contribution of women, and the consequences of gendering
of work, while focusing on women engaged in varied work in different parts of India, living and working in dismal
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Jain Indira Hirway Deepita Chakravarty, Ishita Chakravarty Uma Kothari J Jeyaranjan, Padmini Swaminathan Meena Gopal Millie Nihila
Forum against Oppression of Women Srilatha Batliwala Miriam Sharma, Urmila Vanjani J Jeyaranjan

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