'Living is like waiting for death' - Workers' hope: sale of garden

AVIJIT SINHA, TT,Demdima (Alipurduar), Dec. 8: The lush tea garden nestled below the Bhutan hills makes for a pretty picture. But inside the estate, a middle-aged woman is given to sudden bouts of wailing.

In her tribal dialect, the woman shouts that she wants to die. Then she falls silent and lies down outside her mud hut and keeps muttering. The woman is 50-year-old Sudhain Oraon, a temporary garden worker who cannot remember when last she had a full meal.

The tea garden is Demdima, the privately-owned estate that G.P. Goenka has recently said he plans to sell to clear the dues of several thousands of tea workers in his 14 gardens that are a part of Duncans Industries Ltd (DIL). The Demdima garden runs under the name of Santipara Tea Company, but the board at the entrance gives the address of Duncan House, Calcutta.

The company DIL is in the sick bay - it is under the supervision of the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction - so Goenka cannot sell any of the other 14 gardens easily.

Demdima in Alipurduar district has 1,155 permanent workers, according to records with the state labour department. There are around 1,500 casual workers and the total population in the garden is 7,200.

Most workers that this newspaper spoke to said they had not got regular wages since April. There was state-backed relief available to all since October, but it was inadequate in quantity, many Demdima workers said.

Sudhain's wailing could seem like an extreme show of helplessness, but several discussions with other garden workers revealed that many of them think they have been left to die.
What the workers say would be factually incorrect - the government is giving rice and wheat at a nominal price in the ailing garden - but they spoke out of desperation.

(Left) Sudhain Oraon lies in the verandah of her home;  Tailor Mohammad Ismail 

works in Demdima garden.  Pictures by Anirban Choudhury

According to garden workers, 20 residents of the Demdima garden have died after April and whatever help came from the state was slow. By the time chief minister Mamata Banerjee threatened in November to "take over" gardens not being run well by their owners, more than 50 workers had died in various gardens in the Dooars.

No government agency tabulates garden workers' deaths separately. In government records the reason behind the deaths, whether caused by lack of nutrition or not, are recorded as illnesses that the workers or their family members suffered from at the time of their death. Therefore, it is difficult to get an official figure on the deaths in any garden.

Suresh Bhunia, a permanent worker in Demdima, lost his wife two months back which he blamed on lack of food. He could not produce the death certificate of the government hospital where his wife had been admitted.

Suresh, who has three children, also spoke of life in terms of death. "This garden is unofficially closed and we are dying here. I lost my wife, who had become too weak. We had little money. We could not buy adequate food, and to feed me and the children she would eat only once a day," he said.

Lalita Oraon, 45, who is Sudhain's neighbour, tried to explain why the woman has been wailing.

Lalita has a problem with her feet so she cannot walk, hence cannot work in the tea garden. She has five children and her husband worked in Demdima.

"Sudhain is ill and there is nobody to care for her. She can't walk on her own. She is so weak that she needs somebody's help."

She said Sudhain's husband Dasrath worked in Demdima. According to the daily wage rate, Dasrath, in his fifties, was entitled to Rs 122.50 for a day's work, which totals to a little more than Rs 3,500 a month.

When this paper went to speak to Sudhain, Dasrath was not at home. He was out to collect small stones from the banks of the Birbiti river, 3km away. Dasrath, who has asthma, and many other workers collect and sort out the stones, arrange them in pre-arranged box shapes. For each such heap of stones, they are given Rs 40. The stones are used for construction elsewhere.

Lalita said the couple did not eat two days back "as Dasrath felt weak and could not go to the river bed to collect stones". "Like the other residents of the garden, Sudhain has never been in this kind of poverty. She seems to be in a state of delirium. She yells that she wants to die. She wails," Lalita said.

Bishnu Oraon, another neighbour of Sudhain, said: "There is nobody in Sudhain's family to go and collect the rice and wheat provided as relief."

Suresh and many other workers said they wanted the garden to be sold fast.

"I came to know about this new development (about the prospect of the garden's sale) from some youths who had heard about it in Birpara," Suresh said. "We are not concerned about how the company would spend the money but we want the garden to open. If normality can be restored after it is sold to a new owner, let it be sold quickly. No more workers will die for lack of food," he said.

After Mamata's intervention in November, workers in ailing tea gardens have started to get 5kg rice and 3kg wheat for each member every month for Rs 2 a kg. But Lalita said the quantities were inadequate

Her husband Anil does odd jobs in Birpara, 5km away, or goes to the riverbed to collect stones like Dasrath.

"We have rice and wheat at home, which we feed our children. Some days, we don't bother to get the wheat ground to make flour. I simply boil and give it to the children," Lalita said. When the quantities fall short, the father and mother skip meals for the children to save the "precious stock" for another day.

"Many of us here seem to be waiting for death and if the owner wants to sell Demdima, let that happen. We feel that there are higher chances that our garden will start functioning normally and we would get our wages, rations and other dues. We can at least have proper food every day," Anil said.

"My daughter, who is four, has stopped asking for food because Lalita scolded and beaten her up for it," he said.

Cooked food is now served to schoolchildren at anganwadi centres everyday, but a medical team visits only once or twice in a week, residents of Demdima said.

In Demdima, the only person who seems to be busy is a tailor. But his account also pointed to the abject poverty of the garden's residents.

Tailor Mohammad Ismail stays in nearby Ethelbari, but comes to Demdima every day with his sewing machine. There are too many old clothes to mend, he said.

"For the past six-seven months, people have come to me with heaps of old clothes, insisting that I put fresh stitches or a couple of buttons," Ismail said. "They come with such tattered clothes that sometimes I tell them they are beyond repair. Nobody buys new clothes here."

Pancham Kuzur, a worker in Demdima and social worker, said the buizz about the garden's sale has kindled hope in the workers' minds.

"People can't live on state relief forever and are desperately seeking a change. The news of the garden's sale has made them hopeful. But we have been pushed to a corner and naturally, most people are least bothered as who the new owner would be. We are more interested to see if the new owner resumes normal functioning of the garden," Pancham said. "At least 20 residents have died here so far in the last eight months."

Government officials said they were trying their best. "Other than the existing aid, we are providing an additional relief of Rs 120 in cash and 12kg of rice. Also, we have decided to pay people working under the 100 days' job scheme from December 1 as the situation is different here. A scheme of distributing cooked food to senior citizens will also start shortly," said Rajib Dasgupta, the BDO of Birpara-Madarihat block.

He said their was a "shortage of manpower at the block health department, so the medical team was visiting each of the ailing and closed tea estates of this block on alternate days."

ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY ANIRBAN CHOWDHURY