The government has recently started listing beneficiaries of a special programme to improve the lives and livelihoods of the country’s tea workers. It sounds good but not hopeful. Anyway the scheme has left out temporary tea workers, despite their number being significantly high. The country currently has 166 tea gardens, where there are 103,747 permanent workers and 36,437 temporary workers. Around seven and a half lakh people are directly and indirectly related to tea workers.
In many small and remote tea estates, there are no permanent tea workers. This means the government’s scheme will exclude the vast number of workers employed by these gardens from these benefits. They get no benefits other than the regular wage who work the same hours as permanent workers. While permanent workers get medical treatment, ration, homestead and provident fund benefits under the scheme, temporary workers get nothing. Undeniably, the tea workers are the least paid in the country’s labour force. Every morning a cup of tea comes to us through the sweat, starvation, unhuman toil and deprivation of basic needs of the thousands of tea workers across the country.
A recent study underscored that 74 per cent of tea garden workers in Sylhet still live below the poverty line. Tea garden worker receives only Tk 85-120 as a daily wage. All their sufferings are related to their meagre income, it is more than three times less than the average farm worker earns daily. Thus, most of the tea workers could not intake minimum food and nutrition and are highly malnourished. The tea workers are reportedly leading an inhumane life.
The tea workers’ rights to live with dignity is denied. The basic necessities, like food, clothes, housing, education and health are hardly met by the tea workers. The government for many years has been discussing for increasing the wage of tea workers, but to protect vested quarters interest, the policy of minimum wage are non-applicable to temporary tea workers.
