The dying tea gardens of North Bengal

When Thuiya Oraon and Kishore Singh joined the Lankapara Tea estate on the banks of the Bangri river, bordering the blue hills of Bhutan, as security guards, the garden was producing up to 2 million kg (mkg) of tea, with yields far in excess of the regional average.

That was in the early 1980s, when tea fetched super-normal profits, courtesy Russian buying.

The good times stretched up to 1990s when GP Goenka’s Duncan Goenka Group emerged as a major player in the North Bengal tea industry, controlling as many as 14 quality gardens.

The list includes two Darjeeling estates and two ‘project gardens’, operating outside the purview of the Plantation Labour Act, in the plains.

Fall of an empire All that is history now. The group flagship Duncan Industries Ltd was declared sick in 2006. The Darjeeling gardens were virtually sold out.

And beginning March-April 2015, the group unofficially closed down all 12 gardens in the plains of North Bengal, throwing the lives 19,500 permanent workers and just as many casual workers off-gear, with wages and salaries and statutory dues remaining unpaid.

Lankapara was one of the first estates to be shut down. Soon six more neighbouring Duncan gardens (Birpara, Hantapara, Dumchipara, Tulsipara), located within 15 km of Birpara on NH-31D, were closed.

On January 28, the Tea Board decided to take over management control of the seven gardens near Birpara invoking clause 16(E) of the Tea Act, 1953. The takeover will not be smooth, given that the ownership rests with Goenka, who has gone to court.

The fate of three more estates (Kilcott, Nagasuree and Bagracott) and two project gardens (Madarihat and Terai Land) is undecided.

Angry locals recently wrested control of the 250-hectare Madarihat project, where Duncan had acquired farming rights in compromise of the Land Ceiling Act, with the promise of jobs to erstwhile landholders.

Gross mismanagement

But what triggered the downfall of Duncan, that too in the face of a systemic recovery in tea prices since 2007?

Group chairman GP Goenka refused to respond to queries. But former managers of the group estates point out that the group practically stopped re-investing throughout the past decade; consequently yields fell, and the business turned unviable.

The problem, they say, began with the dip in tea prices between 2000 and 2006. Cash-strapped Duncan could not weather this crisis.

It started cutting corners by restricting use of agri-inputs, re-plantation and others to meet the cash shortfall.

The result was catastrophic. Between 2005 and 2015, tea production came down to nearly half in most of the estates, with the average age of bushes crossing 50 years against 35 in the best of the gardens in the region.

According to one former employee, parts of land in some gardens, like Lankapara, became unsuitable for plantation as the company failed to prevent dolomite seepage from river water.

Despair vs hope Lankpara is today a dying garden – unkempt tea bushes that missed many a round of pruning, vanishing shed trees that keep the tea leaves juicy and aromatic.

Most of the able-bodied men have joined the list of migratory workers in other States. Singh’s son is a seasonal labourer in Kerala. Many women have left for Delhi to work as housemaids.

Those left behind, mostly children and the elderly, collect boulders from the dry riverbed of the Bangri. A heap of them fetches ₹100.

But that’s not an easy task as quarrying has left few stones behind. “There are not many stones to collect,” says 15-year-old Tora Lohar, a former casual labourer from ‘Line No 20’. Lohar is planning to go to Delhi to try and make a living.

In the tea world, a dead garden is rarely revived. But Oraon and Singh are not ready to give in to despair. They have taken the task of securing the safety of the plant and machinery, voluntarily.

Someone told them that their ‘ malik ’ (owner) will be back soon and so they are out here to protect the property for him. Ask them why they were giving free labour, and pat comes the reply: “It’s our temple.”

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