Money is the knee-jerk answer given for the sudden change. From 2001 to 2008, the daily wage for a plucker rose just a total of Rs 12.10. In 2008—after a fifteen-day strike by workers—it was increased from Rs 53.90 to Rs 67, with a cumulative Rs 13.10 increase spread over three years. In 2011, the unions wanted the daily wage to rise to between Rs 120 and 154. Predictably, owners balked. As the first flush got under way, unions embargoed the dispatch of all tea. Gardens were heavily guarded and not a single leaf was allowed to leave. In early April, the owners, desperate not to miss out on their important spring harvest, agreed to Rs 90 plus perks valued around the same amount. That was a 34 percent increase—the largest annual wage increase in Darjeeling’s history. As 70 percent of the cost of producing tea is labor, that immediately pushed up a garden’s total production cost by nearly a quarter.
Among some management, the thought was “Well, we’ll pay, but at least they’ll show up to work,” one planter recalled. “They didn’t.”
For many workers, the pay is simply not enough for essentials, much less to get ahead. “Life is too expensive,” a worker on Makaibari complained. “You can buy nothing with ninety rupees.” In nearby Kurseong, a liter of petrol costs Rs 85 (roughly $6.20 per gallon), and a chicken in the market costs Rs 180. Individual cigarettes sell for Rs 6 in the small shops around Makaibari (a day’s work for fifteen smokes!), a single building brick for a house costs Rs 7, and a two-liter bottle of Coke costs Rs 52. Prices are higher on gardens farther from towns and their markets. That same Coke costs Rs 68 on Glenburn, and a bar of Lux soap goes for Rs 22, with the more luxurious Dove for exactly double that.
So pluckers look for work elsewhere.
Yet, because of the live-in system and the convoluted laws about firing workers, gardens continue to pay periodically absent workers and cannot easily replace them.
But even if they could, the vacuum is nearly impossible to fill. Estates along main roads can try to import day laborers. Castleton, which edges Kurseong, for instance, is in a privileged location, and with absenteeism running around 35 percent, according to one of the garden’s accountants in autumn, it was bringing in a few hundred workers every morning in the back of pickups. These could be seen grinding up the steep, narrow roads to Kurseong in the early morning. But busing in a daily workforce is difficult and expensive and is merely a stopgap. During the 2013 harvests, few gardens were even attempting it. Some tried to make up their labor deficit by offering their own workers higher bonuses or extra plucking hours for those who wanted more work, and by pulling women out of retirement. Others simply chose which sections of the estates to best focus their workers’ energies on.
Mechanizing is not an option. The steepness of the slopes and the selective plucking required make this impossible, while the continually shifting leaf and climate variables make automation in processing tea equally unfeasible.
Ironically Jungpana, long hindered by its isolation and the additional effort in bringing up goods and getting out tea, is seeing the lowest absenteeism in the district. “It’s not an issue,” said Jungpana’s assistant manager, S. K. Choudhary, while walking through the misty monsoon fields of the garden. “Just ten or eleven percent.” For one, it’s too far to go for workers to find other day jobs.*
Labor shortages do not just reduce the quantity of tea a garden can produce, but can also harm its quality. Tea bushes need to be plucked every week, and gardens require a crew that can manage a seven-day plucking round.† The quality of the tea suffers if the leaves cannot be plucked at that interval.
Finding workers is exacerbated by the promise of higher salaries elsewhere. Dreams of a more middle-class lifestyle are drawing the labor pool away from Darjeeling’s gardens, as is the Indian government’s rural-development scheme that offers guaranteed work on low-skilled projects such as road building.
But doubling, even tripling, pay does not appear to offer much of a solution.
“There are three reasons why the labor problem is not only about wages,” explained Sandeep Mukherjee in his office during the first flush. First is education. The parents of today’s workers were illiterate. “Now the kids go to school and don’t want to follow what their parents did.” While many do not finish their studies and few go on to university, they are far from uneducated. The schooling, even half-finished, is a stepping-stone off the garden. At Glenburn, Namring, and many other estates, education is a priority for management, and they do what they can to supplement the government’s resources. Namring has sixteen schools on the estate. The garden now offers a choice between Nepali-medium or English-medium schools. Paradoxically, managers acknowledge they are actively, passionately, and purposefully educating away their future workforce.
Television also plays a major role in the labor problem. Previous generations of pluckers were not exposed to the world beyond the tea estates. They stayed “cooped up” on the garden, spent their whole lives there, and usually knew little outside the hills. Now they have TV and can glimpse the rest of the world. “They can’t help but see what others have and what they have and compare the two.” Mukherjee stopped there, not needing to add the connecting thought: now they want more.
Exposure to education and the world at large has produced aspirations. “They know that if they stay, they will go no further than their parents,” Mukherjee said, watching his cigarette smoke float out an opened window. “They want to go further than their parents.” And the parents want their kids to go further.
One father in his thirties at Castleton Tea Estate stands in for many. His mother had been a plucker on the garden, his grandmother, and most likely his great-grandmother. His wife plucked for two years before she quit. It wasn’t worth it, they decided, and they sold her hereditary position on the estate for Rs 10,000 ($180). Their house was built and renovated by the family, and the garden cannot kick them out, he said, so they continue to live on Castleton but receive nothing from the estate. He works as a driver for a hotel in Kurseong and makes only marginally more than he would on the tea estate—Rs 3,500 (about $65) a month—“but I can learn more, like practice my English,” he said. Here he has hope of advancing. He and his wife have two young daughters and are paying for a private school in Kurseong.
Would he want his daughters to work on the garden? “No way.” He shook his head sharply. If the gardens paid not Rs 90 but, say, double that? “My wife would return,” he thought. His kids? He shook his head again. Rs 400? Rs 600? He kept shaking his head. “If our daughter is working on a tea estate, we are not proud,” he said self-assuredly. “If she is working a government job, we are proud.”
What is happening in Darjeeling is part of a larger, nationwide trend—a global one, actually—of people fleeing rural agricultural work. Indians have become more mobile, able to go out and seek a better—or at least different—life away from the fields. Their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did not have that option. The tea estates in Darjeeling are not immune, and the younger generation is fleeing the Himalayan foothills of their birth.
“No matter how much we pay,” Mukherjee said, “the mind-set has already settled in the younger generation. Anything but pluck tea.”
“There is no solution,” said Rajesh Pareek on Tukvar.
Sanjay Sharma agreed, “There is no solution because it will continue to rise.”
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