Black tea: Shut tea estates and the Pied Pipers of North Bengal

To the left of the motorable road, it is a picturesque sea of green. The waist-high shrubs beckon you to get off your car and take the road dividing the garden. From a distance, the Red Bank tea estate in Banarhat, Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, is a scene of serenity. But behind the beautiful dark green exteriors, lies a reality marred by hunger deaths and stories of extreme poverty. And, other darker realities.

The illusion

Sumita Oraon (name changed) is a 14-year-old girl. Seven months back, one evening, a man followed her home, while she was on her way back from collecting firewood from the forests. She had seen this 30-something man loitering around her village a couple of times, but never paid much attention, since he never bothered her. That September evening, amid a light drizzle, Sumita saw the man walking up to her severely ill and bed-ridden father. He asked Oraon if he’d be willing to let his daughter go and work in the "shohor" (city). She would be paid handsomely every month, and wouldn’t have to work as rigorously as she did at the tea garden, he said. Her father had two days to decide. On the third, the man said, his friend would be taking other girls from the nearby tea estates to the city.

The first night, Sumita’s parents discussed the matter at length, and arrived at a decision. They agreed that it was easier to feed two mouths than three. Their family had been living on a half-meal once in two days. On most days, the meal would comprise tea leaves from the overgrown bushes and wild herbs. They’d seen their neighbours die of starvation over the years, as the ownership of Red Bank passed from one person to another, without any change in their lives. The estate had been shut down in 2003, went into liquidation in 2005, was re-opened in 2011, closed in 2012, opened again in June 2013, and shut down again after a couple of months. Since October 2013, it has stayed abandoned.

The deal was sealed. The man asked Sumita and her family to call him just "Dada". He handed her father Rs 1,000, in a wad of ten-rupee notes, Sumita’s price. Dada took her to the nearest bus stop, from where a young man escorted her on a shared tempo, to the New Jalpaiguri railway station. She was handed over to a man in his late thirties at the station, who was addressed as "Captain".

Captain and Sumita boarded the North East Express. He told her to behave like they were cousins. At Kishanganj, Captain got some food for the two of them. Sumita went off to sleep soon after. All through the next day, she was queasy and kept to her upper berth most of the time.

The train chugged into the Anand Vihar Railway Station, Delhi that night, and the two of them deboarded. Sumita was ordered to ask nothing and trust Captain, and she obeyed, despite gazing at the sea of humans in wide-eyed wonder. She had never been outside Red Bank earlier.

A well-built, in-his-thirties man called Bansi met them outside the station. Captain told Sumita that Bansi would take her to her workplace. A van waited for them, and once inside, Bansi blindfolded Sumita, asking her to stay quiet. The teenager didn’t utter a single word on the way to who-knows-where. When the cloth was taken off her eyes, she was in a room with eleven other girls, of roughly the same age. All of them looked exhausted, and were under the hawk-eyed surveillance of a strongly-built, intimidating woman. Here, Sumita and the others didn’t need to be told that they needed to keep quiet.

The disillusionment

The next morning, all twelve of them were blindfolded again, and taken to a hall of sorts. The blindfolds were removed, and Sumita saw herself and the others queued up, and in front of about a dozen middle-aged men. These men looked or dressed nothing like the men back home. The first girl in the line was soon pushed in front of them, and a man shouted out something in Hindi. Sumita’s knowledge of that strange language was limited to monetary transactions she had to do during the weekly market back home. So when one of the men shouted out "Chaalis hazaar", it wasn’t difficult for her to gauge that they were being auctioned off. The bid for the first girl was sealed at Rs 40,000.

Soon, it was Sumita’s turn. By then, there were only three men in the room. One of them shouted out a "Paitees hazaar" (35,000), and she found herself being blindfolded yet again. This new man asked her to get into the vehicle that was waiting for them. After what seemed like ages, the car stopped. She could hear numerous noises; a cacophony of strange male and female voices, as she felt her way up the stairs that she had been asked to climb. The blindfold was removed once she entered a semi-squalid room, and the man asked her to have a good night’s sleep before she began her "work" the next morning. She was left with a middle-aged woman, who flashed her paan-stained teeth in a twisted smile. Her calculating eyes scanned Sumita’s body, lingering for a while on her blossoming teenage bosom and at the bend of the waist.

“Mujhe ‘Kaki’ bulaana (Call me aunt),” the woman said with a sneer. And then directed Sumita to a room.“Yahan rahegi toh kaam seekh jaayegi. Pehli baar thoda dard hoga; baad mein achcha lagega, (If you stay here, you’ll learn the trade. It will hurt a bit the first time; later, you’ll start liking it,” Kaki said.

It did hurt the first time. She had never been through any physical pain that came even remotely close to that man thrusting himself into her that night.

From that day sometime in mid-September, to just about a month ago, Sumita learnt to keep her sorrows to herself, and wept every night into the dirty yellow pillow that she had received as part of her sleeping paraphernalia. Man after man forced himself upon her from early morning to the time clocks stopped screaming out the hours. Night after night passed under masses of these unknown, unkempt bodies.

The rescuing

One Spring afternoon, about a month ago, the building erupted in strange activity. Sumita could hear Kaki screaming out to the other residents of the place, asking them to gather in the hall. She walked out to find the entire hall teeming with people; there were several policemen and women, a few other men and women who looked like "shohorer lok" (the city folk), and the other girls who lived with them. She realised from snatches of conversations in Hindi that they were "being rescued", and would soon be taken home.

A young woman asked Sumita for her address. All the girls were taken to the nearby police station, and she was asked to stand along with two other girls. Sumita later learnt that one of the other girls in the trio was from Dheklapara, and the other from Dharanipur, both tea estates in Dooars which have been lying shut for a while.

Soon, the three of them were taken to the Old Delhi Railway Station, from where they boarded the Brahmaputra Mail. The young woman who had asked them for their addresses at Kaki’s place was with them.

From New Jalpaiguri, the woman helped the three of them board three different buses, which would take them to their respective places. In a few hours, Sumita got off at the bus stop where Dada had left her at, all those months ago. She spent about an hour walking to her house.

She waited inside the empty hut for a while, not knowing how to stop weeping. Her father was nowhere to be seen. After some time, she could see her mother at the doorway, firewood atop her head, back after a dawn-to-dusk day of breaking stones on the banks of the river Diana, and then to the forest. The two of them broke down.

As the tears flew, her mother told her that her father had passed away a few months back. He couldn’t be taken to a hospital. The one in Red Bank had been shut for several years. The one in the town was too far.

The statistics

Since October 2013, when Red Bank was closed down, 46 people have died within its confines – a few have committed suicide, some died of starvation, and the most met their ends due to malnutrition-related diseases. In Bundapani, Alipurduar, the death toll has been 22 since it was shut down. Dheklapara added its own figures to the statistics: 33 deaths. In the earlier-abandoned, now-functional Raipur tea estate, six people have died due to starvation.

In West Bengal, there are 276 organised tea gardens – 81 in Darjeeling, 45 in Terai, and 150 in Dooars. Some 11,24,907 people from 1,86,559 families are dependent on these tea gardens for their lives. Out of these, 2,62,426 are permanent labourers, employed with the tea estates; the number of casual workers are 8,72,938. At present, eight tea gardens lie abandoned, while many others struggle their way to tea production. Out of the 276 tea gardens, only 166 have hospitals, which, in turn, have only 56 resident doctors. The rest of the estates are dependent on the whims and fancies of visiting doctors. Only 22 among these gardens are covered under the Annapurna Antoday Yojana, which provides rations to the "poorest of the poor". The Sajal Dhara Project (to ensure clean, drinkable water) is operational only in 61 of these 276 gardens. The rest of the workers are forced to drink water from the hill streams, contaminated with pesticides and other industrial waste flowing down from Bhutan.

Behind the facades

The results are not pretty. Families of workers in the shut tea estates are compelled to either accept their situation as their fate, or give up their daughters and young wives to the numerous "Dadas" who are sent by "franchises" to scout around the area. The worse the condition of a family; the easier and cheaper the deal. A young widow or a woman is sold off for Rs 5-7,000. For a 12/14-year-old, that amount is Rs 6,000. Year after year, girls are being trafficked to various parts of the country and the Middle East, sold off as sex workers or sent to live a life of misery as domestic helps. Year after year, 10,000 Sumita Oraons are transported to Delhi or Mumbai, and disappear among the people in those metropolises.

These women trafficking gangs function from two headquarters – one in Delhi, the other in Mumbai. While the girls sent to Delhi are sold off to brothels or as domestic helps in North India, Madhya Pradesh and the likes, from Mumbai, the girls are sent to the Middle East. The "work": Prostitution.

From the tea estates to the headquarters, these girls and women change hands thrice, much like what happened with Sumita. In 90 per cent of these cases, the local police have not a clue. The complaints that are registered are done under the category "Missing". The number of these "missing" women has trebled in the last six years, say NGOs. While most people in the area are aware that the "missing" is just a euphemism for "trafficked" / "smuggled", the complaints don’t reflect so. While several families willingly trade their women for a square meal a day, the rebellious ones are threatened into silence by the racket musclemen or at gunpoint.

Once picked up from these tea gardens, several agents take the girls to secret "sorting outposts" in Siliguri or Dooars. Bouncers and armed security guard these "safe-houses". Here on, in the interim before the girls are sent to board the train to Delhi / Mumbai, several agents make some quick bucks for themselves. They take these girls to houses in Jaigaon or Siliguri, where the girls receive their "training", while the agents stuff their pockets. The exploitation is manifold.

Rescuing tough; acceptance tougher

A few days back, 22-year-old Fulu Kujur (name changed) was rescued from Delhi, and sent back home to the Dalmore Tea Estate in Birpara, Alipurduar. Fulu’s family refused to accept her back into their lives, after realising that she had spent her last few months as a sex worker. Luckily for the woman, her marginally better-off maternal uncle allowed her to stay in their house in the nearby Dalgaon Tea Estate.

In Dalmore, a year back, an assistant tea garden manager was hacked to death by a labourer after Ajit Panwar (the manager) had allegedly molested the latter’s wife. In Dalgaon, 2003 had seen 19 people burnt alive by tea garden workers who had risen in rebellion against their workers’ union secretary Tarakeshwar Lohar. While Lohar escaped back then, the troubles in these tea gardens are far from over.

Mypopic, apathetic government

The state government refuses to accept that women from the tea gardens in North Bengal are being trafficked day in and day out. The myopia is so severe that while numerous NGOs in Kalchini and Madarihat have actually conducted surveys and come up with figures (from 20 tea gardens, 800 women are reported "missing" each year, officially. The unofficial figures are many times that number), spokespeople from the ruling party, Trinamool Congress, have refuted them. The complacency and indifference on the part of the government have led to voices claiming that political parties are hand-in-glove with these trafficking gangs. In numerous cases, several agents have been recognised as members of one political party or the other. The NGOs or standalone groups, which try and delve deeper into these rackets, are threatened into withdrawal and silence.

At the inauguration of a women’s cell in Cooch Behar, West Bengal, the Inspector General of Police (North Bengal) Gyanwant Singh admitted on record that women from the area are being trafficked to other parts of the country. Unable to cope with empty stomachs and the abject misery, these girls are at times voluntarily, at others forcibly boarding the trains to Delhi or Mumbai, in the hope of a better life. Deceived with glimpses of three whole meals a day, a soft bed to sleep on and money to send back home; the girls follow these Pied Pipers to their doom. After several months of going "missing", they are wiped off memory. As for government statistics, they never really figured there in the first place. The loss is no one’s.

Eons of exploitation

An emaciated Dhiru Saontal, 88, can feel his end getting near each day. “Independence was a bane for us. We were happier when the sahebs were around,” says Saontal, whose dementia and memory loss is getting the better of him these days. His version, though, is not entirely a cock-and-bull tale.

The British had brought these men and women from the Chhota Nagpur plateau to work on the tea plantations, as indentured labour. A few years after 1947, the ownership of the estates changed hands, from the British to businessmen who could afford running them. In 1951, the Plantations Labour Act (PLA) was penned down, which mandated the employers (owners of the estates) to ensure, apart from the daily wage, Provident Fund and Gratuity, etc. for the workers, many in-kind benefits.

For a person who has visited any of these tea estates in North Bengal, working, non-working, et al, a look at the details of the PLA is a slap across the face. The largely illiterate tea garden workers are light years away from knowing what their rights are. In the daily battle that is getting one proper meal of a few morsels of rice and a piece of boiled papaya, taking the plantation management to court is but a reality in a parallel universe.

No answers, no hope

For these labourers, there are no answers. As for the government, there are audible sighs on the mic, ball-point signs on dotted lines, three days of surveys and stays at the three-star resort in Chalsa, hours of promises from the makeshift podiums... followed by years of indifference. Or plain negligence.

As the pleasing green of the Dooars melts away into the concrete runway of Bagdogra, the forever-deferred dreams of a better life in the eyes of the worker are left to rot and die.