Darjeeling is again in the midst of unrest as the tea garden workers have been denied their 20% bonus. This bonus not only determines how the upcoming festival ‘Dasai’ will be celebrated but also constitutes a significant part of the household savings for these workers.
The denial of minimum wages and annual bonuses, alongside claims from owners and management that the business is failing to fetch profits, strongly suggests that the world-renowned Darjeeling tea has lost its charm in the market. Whether Darjeeling tea is genuinely struggling to fetch market prices is a separate debate.
With no alternative employment opportunities or land rights, tea garden workers are perpetually denied their minimum wages and remain bound to injustice. Without alternate employment options, collective bargaining efforts will not yield any results, as management is fully aware of the workers’ lack of other employment opportunities and confident that the status quo will be maintained (i.e., workers will continue to work for less than the minimum wage).
Would advocating for wage hikes and bonuses by an autonomous self-governing body like the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration yield results? Given the unilateral deviations exhibited by administrators empowered under the act in the past, along with the strong lobbying from tea garden management, the result will likely be the continuation of the status quo, worsening the situation for workers.
The absence of alternative employment and exploitative wage structures has driven many workers to migrate to cities in search of menial jobs. Darjeeling, being a historic heritage site and a geopolitically strategic location, requires stakeholders from government, society, and markets to acknowledge that migration, financial instability, and agitated youth pose serious risks not only to the local population and the tea industry but also to the country as a whole.
Therefore, stakeholders must design both short- and long-term interventions. In the short term, stakeholders should actively foster or induce external participation in employment opportunities in sectors such as animal husbandry, MSMEs, sericulture, and tourism. This would not only provide alternate employment opportunities but also strengthen the bargaining power of tea garden workers.
In the long term, interventions should focus on education, youth engagement, and skill development to disincentivise migration to cities in search of menial jobs and foster entrepreneurship. This would catalyse job creation, averting a significant market failure.
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The author is a Public Policy practitioner based in Delhi. Views expressed are personal.