Home >> South Asia >> India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal

     Email   Print 

Tea Estates Closure Lead To Mass Starvation And Death In India

Bhuwan Thapaliya - 6/13/2007

India has seen a lot of changes in the last two decades. During the past twenty years India has achieved progress at an impressive pace. It has achieved gain in health, transport, and education. But despite the vast opportunities created by the technological revolution, rural unemployment, as it was then is yet the most important challenge facing the modern India.

It has been reported by the Reuters News agency that at least 700 Indian tea workers have died from diseases related with malnutrition over the past year after the closure of 16 tea estates in Jalpaiguri, a remote part of West Bengal, tea estates.

In the last two years, poor tea production and low yields led the closure of tea estate. This left the plantation workers with no income and alternative jobs, and as a direct consequence hundreds of plantation workers are still starving, a court inquiry has found.

“Investigations by the Supreme Court and tea workers' associations found that this had directly led to the deaths, leaving hundreds more unable to feed themselves,” according to the Reuters.

But the government version of the death is somewhat political. Embarrassing this may be for party bosses, as they are accountable to the rural people of India, on whose vote their future political stake depends. But it seems, they are trying to decamp from the crux of the problem.

The government says the deaths, which they have recorded to be around 570, are related to diseases unrelated to starvation. But observers say this very statement of government is odd. Perhaps, they are hiding the real facade of rural India beneath the veil of so called modernity.

Asked about the crux of the problem that led to the catastrophe, trade unionists blamed the estate owners. The trade unionists said that estate owners did not pay wages to workers following the shutdown.

Considering this, the trade unions and are now fighting the employers for compensation in court, according to the media reports.

Unlike trade unions, tea estate owners are unwilling to comment on the closures, but organizations representing the tea producers say they plan to reopen the estates under a cooperative plan, as per the media reports.

"We will reopen them as soon as possible," Jairam Ramesh, India's junior trade minister, was quote as saying by the Reuters.

India is the world's leading producer and consumer of tea. But because of the closure of tea estates in Jalpaiguri, hundreds of former tea workers are being forced to travel across the border to Bhutan every day to work in stone crushing and mineral factories, according to the media reports.

Reports cite that the money they earn there is not enough to keep their hand and mouth together. How on earth they can manage their life with less then $2 a day?

What about those left behind? Those who stayed back have more horrible story to share. According to the media reports, they are weak, and surviving on bitter gourd for weeks. The message from Jalpaiguri is sobering; they are being forced to forage for food in nearby forests to keep themselves and their children alive.

“It will take more than just Indian economic muscle to keep them secure,” most observers are saying.

In many respects, this is a setback for the Indian economy, which has been competing with the high income industrial countries. Vast developments are occurring in the Indian cities while its villages are shrinking. This has become a strain on the Indian development. This paradox ought to be resolved.