The two companies are the main plantation owners in West Bengal’s Dooars region and do not have too many gardens elsewhere. Between them they produce about 34 million kg of tea a year; Goodricke is slightly bigger—it produces around 18 million kgs.
There are some 3,100 tea growers in Dooars—mostly small ones with less than 10ha under cultivation—producing around 145 million kg of tea a year and employing at least 171,000 people on a daily basis.
Tea workers in Dooars want the cash component of their pay raised to Rs.96 per day from Rs.67 currently, following last year’s wage revision for plantation workers in Darjeeling.
Under pressure from the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) party, tea garden owners in Darjeeling last year agreed to a jump in workers’ cash pay to Rs.90 a day from Rs.67.
Plantation owners also provide other benefits such as cut-price foodgrains, free housing, education and healthcare facilities, in line with established industry norms.
The Dooars workers are pushing for a compensation package comparable with that of their Darjeeling counterparts, but that would result in “huge losses” for tea growers in the region, tea industry officials said.
The revised compensation package, once it is agreed upon, is to be introduced with retrospective effect from 1 April.
Going by the thumb rule that the total cost is normally one-and-a-half times the cash wage of workers, the production cost for these companies is set to go up to Rs.135-140 per kg at a time when tea from this region is selling in auctions at an average price of Rs.110-120 per kg; Darjeeling tea sells for a wide price range, which could go as high as Rs.2,000 per kg.
Not all Darjeeling tea is sold at auction.
Duncan and Goodricke may find it difficult to absorb a cost escalation of this magnitude.
Many gardens would have to be shut, said G.P. Goenka, Duncan’s chairman. “It would be cheaper to buy leaves from gardens with lower social costs than grow your own complying with all regulations on employee benefits,” he added.
“This is extremely disappointing,” said A.N. Singh, managing director, Goodricke. “These politicians are going to kill the industry.”
Wages should not be linked to the cost of production and the ruling price of tea at auctions, said Zia Ul Alam, secretary, Cha Bagan Majdoor Union, a plantation workers union affiliated to the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (Citu).
“The cost of production should be pared with efficiency in management and not by depriving workers of a fair wage,” he said, adding that the unions were demanding a revised compensation in view of the price rise that workers were struggling to cope with.
If plantation owners wish to remain profitable, they should improve accounting practices and remove the intermediaries involved in selling tea, according to Alok Chakraborty, joint secretary of the National Union of Plantation Workers, an affiliate of the Indian National Trade Union Congress (Intuc).
“In reality, this wage revision is going to lead to only a marginal dip in profitability,” he added.
The tea garden workers are planning to intensify their agitation over wages in the next few weeks.
Alam said the workers may go on strike if a solution isn’t arrived at before the middle of August. Similar strikes took place in 1999 and 2005.
The agitation is gaining momentum from the administration’s “tacit support” for the workers, according to government officials, who did not want to be identified.
They said the state government is looking at ways to placate the tribal people and ethnic Bengalis of the Dooars region, who were outraged by the autonomy given to the Gorkhas in Darjeeling as part of the recent peace accord.
“That apart, with all eyes now set on the 2013 panchayat (village council) elections, the Trinamool Congress government (of West Bengal) will surely take a pro-worker position, if at all it intervenes in the stand off,” one of them said.
~Manish Basu, manish.b@livemint.com
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