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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Boiling over -Madhuparna Das

Boiling over -Madhuparna Das

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published Published on Dec 14, 2014   modified Modified on Dec 14, 2014
-The Indian Express

The lynching of a tea estate owner in Jalpaiguri last month has stirred up trouble in the already edgy tea gardens of north Bengal, where lockouts, labour unrest and poverty form a volatile mix.

It's all quiet at Labour Lines, the workers' quarters of Sonali Tea Estate in Jalpaiguri. It has just been two days since Rajesh Jhunjhunwala, the 45-year-old owner of the tea gardens, was lynched by a mob of workers over delayed wages. Most of the men have fled fearing police action.

The women are either in police custody or at home, their doors shut.

That day, November 22, Jhunjhunwala had been battered to death after a meeting he held with at least 350 workers of his tea garden. The workers had gathered at the owner's bungalow-cum-office to collect their October salaries.

Anjan Kumar Mehte, the manager of the garden who witnessed the lynching, has since shifted from his tea garden bungalow to a small lodge at Malbazzar near the garden. "We pay wages every second Saturday of the month. But the November pay had got delayed due to some issue and the payday was fixed for the 22nd. But the funds did not reach us that day and our owner said it would reach the following day, November 23, at 8 am." Mehte says he knew the workers wouldn't take it well. After all, the ration for October was due and the workers were angry about that.

"I suggested to the owner that he should leave the garden for the time being. But he refused, saying he would talk to the workers. We had lunch together at 2 pm. An hour later, I again requested him to leave. But he refused, saying the workers would hear him out," says Mehte.

By 4 pm, the labourers had started gathering in front of the bungalow. There were at least 350 of them. "The owner requested them to wait until Sunday morning and they agreed. They had just started dispersing when a drunk woman worker tried to assault the owner. I shielded him but around seven other women encircled us. A group of around 10 men dragged me to a corner of the bungalow and another 20 to 30 of them dragged the owner out. I called the Malbazar police station and put the phone on speaker so that they could hear what was happening.

The police reached in 15 minutes, but by then, my owner's head had been smashed with stones," he says, breaking down.

The 542-acre Sonali is one of the oldest tea estates in the Dooars region of Jalpaiguri, north Bengal. The lush green, sloping tea estates of these parts, fringed by the rolling hills of the lower Himalayas, hide a dark story: of labour unrest, unpaid wages, poverty and malnourishment - a concoction often stronger than what the leaves can brew. At times, this heady blend boils over, like it happened at the Sonali estate. Seven months before the Sonali lynching, an assistant manager of Dalmore tea estate in the Dooars had been hacked to death.

It was in 1960, at the Bagdogra estate, that the first incident of lynching of a tea garden owner was reported in these parts. In 1987, an estate manager at the Kailashpore garden in Jalpaiguri was hacked to death. Since then, these incidents have come up with disturbing frequency. An unrest in November 2003 at the Dalgaon tea estate had ended with a house being set ablaze, charring to death at least 17 people.

The Dooars region has 153 organised tea gardens, some owned by companies such as Tata and Duncans and other smaller gardens that have changed hands over the years. Jhunjhunwala bought the Sonali garden in 2007. With 364 workers on its rolls, it is among the bigger estates here and produces 10 lakh kg of tea a year.

The tea gardens in Dooars took their biggest hit in the early Nineties with the collapse of the Soviet Union as Russia cut down on its tea imports. "Earlier, the USSR used to import about 130 million kg of tea from India and Dooars contributed at least 30 per cent of that. But that stopped and the industry never quite recovered from that blow. Over the next few years, it was domestic consumption that sustained the industry. But later, the tea produced in the Dooars region faced stiff competition from the Assam variety and eventually conceded the market to them," says P K Bhattacharya, a secretary general of the Tea Association of India and an industry veteran.

Though production went up over the years, profits took a hit as tea growers got very poor rates on their produce at auctions - from a high of over Rs 200 a kg in 1998 to Rs 129 a kg now. This dip in profitability brought with it labour troubles and many gardens had to shut down. At least five of the 120 gardens in Jalpaiguri have shut while two face lockouts over labour unrest. Industry sources say more than half the gardens have reported sick. There are at least 3.5 lakh workers who depend on these gardens.

Though the minimum wage in the state is Rs 216 a day, wages in tea estates hover around Rs 95 a day. The justification for such low wages is that the estate management provides workers other perks - schools, health centres and free ration. But workers say all this exists only on paper. The primary school and health centre in the Sonali estate have been shut for more than a year, say workers. The supply of ration is, at best, erratic, but mostly, it never comes their way. In most of the estates, the workers have organised themselves into different trade unions, their politics and hunger often making for a dangerous mix.

There was outrage in June and July when at least six deaths were reported from Raipur, a tea garden that shut last year. Though the government denied these were ‘starvation deaths', then labour minister Purnendu Bose admitted that the workers had died of ‘malnutrition'.

Later, the government conducted a survey of six shut tea gardens - Dheklapara, Bundapani, Red Bank, Raipur, Surendranagar and Daranipur - and in its report, the health department said it had found 25 children suffering from malnutrition.

The Bundapani tea estate, 100 km from Siliguri town, has been shut for over a year now. The gardens are still green, but the shrubs look overgrown and untended. Under the Financial Assistance for Workers in Locked-out Industrial Units, the government gives Rs 1,500 a month to each worker of a shut tea garden. But with often no other means of livelihood, for most families, that money adds up to very little.

Bipti Mali, 40, says her family of three would go hungry for days on end, surviving only on chaphool (dried flowers of the tea shrub that are sun-dried and boiled) till, one day a couple of years ago, her son simply stopped eating chaphool. This month, her husband died too - "he had nothing to eat", she says. "Four months ago, I migrated to Mumbai as a domestic help. I was trying to earn money for his treatment, but when he died, I came back. I am all alone now. I don't want to live any longer," she says, breaking down.

Back at the Sonali estate, manager Mehte can't get over the shock of the murder he witnessed. "The strange thing is, they did nothing to me, they simply blocked me. I remember how this chowkidar held me tightly and whispered that the workers wouldn't harm me. I still remember his words: ‘Manager babu, hum log aap ko kuchch nahin karenge (manager sir, we won't harm you)," says Mehte, tears rolling down his cheeks.

Storm in a cup

163 tea gardens in Dooars region of Bengal

7 closed and locked-out gardens

176 million kg was the tea produced in 2013, the highest production in Bengal

134 million kg is tea produced till September this year

The Indian Express, 14 December, 2014, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/boiling-over-2/99/


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