Tea board on survey path - Plan for garden health check after prod from minister

BIRESWAR BANERJEE, TT,  Siliguri, Feb. 16: The Tea Board of India has decided to survey and categorise all registered tea gardens in north Bengal into four categories, taking into consideration their financial state and condition of workers, so that spiralling industry trouble such as the Duncans garden deaths may be avoided in the future.

Tea board officials said they had not got the final format for the survey from the Centre - the board is under the Union ministry of commerce and industry - but conceded that Nirmala Sitharaman, the Union minister of state for commerce and industry, in January had made this suggestion while reprimanding the board.

A senior official said that the minister stressed that the board should act as an industry watchdog to help the 278 registered tea gardens that directly employ over 3 lakh people in Darjeeling, the Dooars and Terai.

"We will soon start the process of collecting data from each tea garden located in Terai, Dooars and Darjeeling. Information on a range of issues, right from the annual tea production to the amenities provided to workers to the financial health of the garden, would be collected and compiled. The idea is to have all pertinent information about each tea garden," the official said today.

He did not give any date when the survey would begin.

When asked what prompted the board to make such a move, the official spoke of Sitharaman's meeting on January 4, a day after she visited a closed tea garden and a Duncans group ailing estate in Alipurduar.

He quoted Sitharaman as saying: "The tea board is inactive here and does not have much information about the status of tea estates. Whatever information we gather about the tea gardens, we gather from media reports. The tea board should take up the necessary task of keeping a regular tab on tea gardens and also have updated information."

Sitharaman later told journalists: "The tea board should develop a mechanism as a monitoring agency so that its officials get information about potential closure of any tea estate. They should immediately inform us so that we can, along with the state, intervene and prevent such a closure which takes a toll on tea workers and their families."

The last time a survey was carried out to gauge the financial health of tea gardens in north Bengal was in 2013. It was done by the state labour department.

"As part of the exercise (the upcoming survey), the tea board chairman himself held a meeting here earlier this month with planters who have either closed down their gardens or are running sick gardens to know their plans and constraints which are deterring them from reopening the estates," a tea board source said.

The source added: "Once the data is collected and collated, the tea estates will be graded in four groups on the basis of different parameters. We would then extend expertise and explore options to provide assistance to those tea estates which come in the lower categories so that planters owning these gardens can resolve problems which are holding them back from running the gardens in a proper manner," the sources added.

Among the parameters would be financial health, status of workers' dues, condition of tea plantations and factories and status of other benefits provided to workers and their families.

"Data obtained from all the gardens would be checked and the garden would be put in a grade. It is a part of the process as we can then focus on gardens that are in, say, categories C and D. The Union minister of state had pointed that the tea board should have prior information about sick gardens so that discussions can be held to prevent any abrupt closure, irregularities in payments and production," a tea board official based in Calcutta said over phone.

Tea industry unions said they appreciated the move. "Even though payment of wages and distribution of rations became irregular in the Duncans' gardens in April last year, the central government came to know about the crisis only after people started dying of starvation and malnutrition. The stern remarks made by the minister indicates that the board, despite being the sole monitoring agency of the tea sector, did not inform the Centre about the ongoing crisis," a senior trade union leader in Siliguri said today.

He added: "We welcome the move as it would give a clear picture to the Centre about the plight of workers and their families in most gardens where their fringe benefits are being curtailed in a consistent manner."

A section of planters also welcomed the move. "It would be clear to the Centre that the cost of production is too high, as compared to the prices that our teas from Terai and Dooars fetch in auctions. We want sharing of social costs (with the state or Centre) and if an estimation of the cost of production, vis-à-vis the earnings of tea companies, is made in the survey, it would help us to push forward our demand that social costs should be shared and the Plantation Labour Act should be amended," a representative of the Tea Association of India said.