Skip to main content

The Bitterness of Tea


She, the Producer
Today, 15 Dec, is observed as International Tea Day by countries producing tea.  What the Day brings to my mind primarily is the picture of a tea picker I came across in one of the undulating tea plantations in Darjeeling when Maggie (my wife) and I were on a holiday trip in June 2010.  When the woman noticed us, she came rather shyly and offered her basket to Maggie asking if she wanted a photo with that basket on her back.  In the conversation that followed, the worker listed her grievances.  She was paid a pittance by the plantation owner.  She had to work for endless hours and walk down the hill to the factory where she had to deposit the collected leaves.  She pointed at a distant building and said, “That’s the place I have to take these leaves to.  A long and arduous walk down the hill.  And then the return climb...”  The tourists who paid her Rs 10 for lending her basket for a photo were a very munificent source of income for her in contrast to her employer.

Three years after my encounter with that tea worker, the Guardian published a report titled ‘How poverty wages for tea pickers fuel India's trade in child slavery.’  A tea plantation worker is paid 12 pence an hour, according to the report.  As a result poverty is rampant among the workers and their girl children are trafficked across the country and outside.

I received a mail from the Walk Free Foundation today with a request for support to
I, the Consumer
their campaign for tea workers, particularly asking Tata to do justice to the workers.  Of course, Tata is not the only estate owner that underpays the workers.  But the Foundation feels that “Of all the possible players, Tata Global Beverages has the power to do the most good in this situation and that is why we are calling on them to engage.”

A cup of tea in a shopping mall costs nothing less than Rs 50, a shocking disparity with what a tea picker earns in an hour.  When we dream about the much vaunted development that the malls and clean India symbolise, perhaps we may be ignoring some dark realities crying for attention in many parts of the country, not just in the remote tea gardens.  


This does not mean we don’t need development.  It only means that development cannot be one-sided.  There is gross injustice in such one-sidedness.  As Bryan Stevenson said, “The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.”

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. ManiparnaDecember 15, 2014 at 10:11 PM

    Thanks for reminding us the 'International Tea Day' ...the hapless condition of tea pickers of Assam and Darjeeling is unknown to public. :-(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 16, 2014 at 10:33 AM

      And many of the tea estate owners are people who preach big morality from certain platforms!

      Delete
  2. AnonymousDecember 16, 2014 at 12:52 PM

    ......the opposite of poverty is justice. every walk of life we want it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 16, 2014 at 9:32 PM

      And there are many, too many, in India who are deprived of it.

      Delete
  3. Ragini PuriDecember 16, 2014 at 3:51 PM

    Thanks for this insightful post. Have heard many stories about all kinds of exploitations that happen on large tea estates, wish more NGOs come forward to enlighten the common man about the bitter truth behind their sweet cuppa.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 16, 2014 at 9:33 PM

      The irony is that enterprises like Tata don't need to indulge in such injustice and unfairness. They talk of corporate responsibility and perform some drama in its name while their own employees suffer all kinds of indignities.

      Delete
  4. UnknownDecember 17, 2014 at 1:13 PM

    At the end of the day I guess the only thing that is important is the profits and at what cost is it being done is completely and conveniently ignored.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 17, 2014 at 7:29 PM

      I wonder why people, as they grow old at least, fail to realise that so much profit (or anything of the sort) is not required at all. Instead of grabbing, give it away and make the world a better place and one will find much more happiness...

      Delete
  5. Anand MaraladDecember 18, 2014 at 12:37 AM

    Very disturbing though many farm workers (not just in tea plantations) face this. They need to organize themselves to fight this. NGOs can help build awareness. When they are struggling so much why there is no leader born in them yet?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Why do good to others?

Courtesy: polyp.org.uk “Most people would rather die than think and most people do,” said Bertrand Russell in his characteristic witty way.   Professor of Philosophy and author of many books, A C Grayling, is of the opinion that religion has continued to survive even in today’s scientific world because people don’t want to think.   They would rather accept readymade answers given by religion.   God is the ultimate readymade answer for a whole lot of problems.   And a very easy answer too. If we really think and evolve our own moral systems instead of borrowing them from religion, we will be far better human beings, says Grayling in his latest book, The God Argument.   If we think sensibly (common sense would do if we cared to use that faculty), we will realise that we all have a duty to contribute to the welfare of the entire human species.   The simple logic is that when the species is “flourishing” (Grayling’s word) we too flourish.   ...
33 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

The Call of Islamic State

A year ago, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) reported that about 4000 people from the West left their homes and countries to join the Islamic State (IS).  Many of them are women.  The reporters had made a special study of the women who joined the terrorist outfit and found that it was difficult to categorise which type of women were particularly drawn to IS. “While most of the girls are young, some as young as fifteen,” says the report,  “there are also mothers with young children who make the trip. Some of the girls have difficulties in school and are said to have an IQ below average,  but there are also women who are highly educated. It also appears that even though a relatively large portion of the girls had (or still have) a troubled childhood, there are some who come from families with no known problems with the authorities. Most of the girls come from religiously moderate Muslim families,  yet some converted to Islam a...
33 comments
Read more