-The Hindu With no ownership of land or houses and denial of minimum wage, lakhs of workers continue to live in a vicious cycle of bondage plucking Over the past few elections, Benam Oraon, a tea garden worker at Nagrakata Tea Estate in West Bengal, attended several election meetings and kept a note of the promises which political parties made. This election, however, he is contesting the polls as a candidate from...

-The Hindu The lives of tea-estate workers in West Bengal have worsened in many aspects over the years The tea plantation sector continues to play a significant role in the economy of north Bengal. There are 276 organised tea estates spread over the three tea-growing regions of West Bengal: Darjeeling Hills, Terai and Dooars. Besides the formally registered large tea plantations, there are thousands of small growers. According to one estimate, the...

-TheWire.in Tea plantations are touted as the country's second largest employer, but as many of them shut down, workers are being cheated by agents who exploit and traffick them. The once-thriving tea gardens in the fertile Dooars region of West Bengal have now fallen on hard times. The tea industry is touted as the country’s second largest employer, but also an industry that undermines labour rights and deprives workers and their...

-The Telegraph An indication of how far Narendra Modi could be from the dream of making India a predominantly cashless economy is available in a survey done by a tea planters' association in the Dooars, a tribal belt that employs lakhs of Bengal's workforce in tea estates. The survey done by the Dooars Branch of the Indian Tea Association (DBITA) in its 55 member gardens of the 80-plus estates dotting Japaiguri district...

-Hindustan Times Kolkata/ Darjeeling/ Guwahati: More than five lakh workers in West Bengal’s biggest labour-intensive industries of tea and jute have not got wages since Wednesday when the union government withdrew two high-denomination currency notes. A similar predicament exists in neighbouring Assam and the rest of the Northeast, which has tea estates in remote areas where currency notes will take days to arrive. In Bengal, owners of several tea gardens and jute mills...