Ramjhora's starvation triggered deaths -- pegged at around 200 over the last five years -- made international headlines late last year, but since then, things have only gotten worse, particularly with the unrest facing this area due to bandhs, morchas, road blocks caused by the revival of the agitation/movement for a new Gorkhaland state.
The agitation reportedly costs the tea industry an estimated Rs 20 million or Rs 2 crores per day in early July, mainly due to losses in Darjeeling district during a bandh.
"It is even tougher for these tea workers," says Birsa Oraon, formerly a panchayat member of nearby Lankapara and a one-time union leader who now runs a small shop and is the son of a Ramjhora tea worker. "Prices have risen because of inflation and go even higher in a bandh." And a fierce monsoon has been in sway, bringing illnesses in its wake.
"Many people on this estate are malnourished," says Jhuma Dey, a nurse, and Samir Biswas, a pharmacist at the Ramjhora Estate dispensary, now run by the Birpara Welfare Fund, which remains open three times a week and looks after the former employees. "They are no longer earning properly; they are not eating well. There have been, according to the hospital register, 220 deaths around here since 2002, mostly children and anaemic women, and many cases of diarrhoea."
"While people may not be actually dying of hunger, they are dying of complications brought on by very poor nourishment because they cannot afford to eat enough. Tuberculosis, dysentery and more," says Indrajit Dey, a social worker who works for the Birpara Welfare Fund, an NGO working in this area with state government funding. "They have so many problems with health, schooling, shortage of clothing and water, and we are trying to help them on these issues."
Since the estate shut, workers have patched together meagre earnings from the government's FAWLOI (financial assistance for workers of locked out industries) scheme, which works out to Rs 750 per month. Sustenance, the workers explain, also comes from the central government's recently implemented National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guarantees one member of a rural family 100 days of work, or an unemployment allowance if there is no work to be had. The unemployment allowance works out to one fourth of the minimum wage (Rs 60) for the first 30 days, and at least one half of the minimum wage thereafter. But not all workers qualify for either.
Some of the workers make up the shortfall by labouring at a dolomite factory across the border in Bhutan, 15 km away. The job involves cracking giant, five foot by five by one foot stones -- back-breaking work for which they earn Rs 20 to Rs 50 per day. Says Gopal Gurung, who lives at Godam Line on the estate, "They leave home at 6 am and catch a ride on a truck or a bus to the site. They work 10 hours."
Though the work is extremely hard, requiring the sort of physical strength most of the workers here don't have, there are few other options available to them.
At many homes at Top, New and Godam Line worker quarters at Ramjhora Estate, people are unable to make ends meet.
Image: Unemployed tea workers at Ramjhora Estate.
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