Life of the Workers in an Abandoned Tea garden in North Bengal

Abstract

A tea plantation, apart from being an economic unit, is a social institution, which, to a great extent, controls the lives of their resident work force. The tea industry of North Bengal provides employment to more than three lakh workers. These workers are dependent upon the plantation management for food, water, shelter, education, health, sanitation and more. However, it is taken to be caught in crisis since the early 2000s. The closure and abandonment of several tea plantations of North Bengal has thrown the labourers into a situation of dire uncertainty. They lose their jobs, and there comes a shift in the nature of their work, from permanent labourer in the tea estate to casual labourer elsewhere. Besides losing economic security, they are losing whatever minimum social security they had prior to the closure or abandonment of the estate. The paper aims to understand the reason(s) behind the closure of one particular tea estate from the Terai, namely, Panighatta Tea Estate. The estate has been abandoned since 2015. The paper further tries to analyse the impact of the abandonment and closure upon its concerned labourers.