The Longview estate in Kurseong block is one of Darjeeling district’s largest tea plantations. It lies at the foot of the Darjeeling hills, and stretches across 1,020 hectares.
At around 8 am on May 27, dozens of tea garden workers assembled outside the office of the estate. Their mood was dour: the workers, mostly women, sat on their haunches, and awaited the estate’s manager to demand their wages.
Members of six workers’ unions, supervisors and other community members also stood or sat around in support. The workers had not been paid their meagre daily wage of Rs 230 for between five and seven months. Not only this, they had also learnt that the Rs 30 that is cut from their pay daily for their provident funds was not being deposited in their accounts.
Sumendra Tamang, an executive committee member of the Hill Plantation Employees Union, told Scroll that at the Longview estate, “Since 2013, there are arrears of Rs 15 crore in provident funds and Rs 86 lakh in gratuity.” He added, “Only about 20 people in a hundred might have gotten their PF and gratuity. Others are not able to avail it, some have also died without availing it.” Indeed, tea estates in Darjeeling have a long history of defaulting on workers’ provident funds.
Among those who gathered that day was 66-year-old Devika Pariyar, who began working at Longview in her early twenties. Her husband died around a decade ago and her daughter got married a few years ago – since then, she has lived alone.
Pariyar has no savings and thus, no financial safety net. “I get free rice from the government, but my sisters send me oil and vegetables,” she said. “I had to rely on them to get my daughter married.”
In fact, her younger sister’s children are currently her main source of financial support. “Youngsters are migrating for better paying jobs,” she said. “My niece works in a parlour in Kerala and my nephew works as a cook in Karnataka.”
The manager did not arrive that day. After waiting for about two hours, the women workers got up and went back to work, at the behest of their supervisors.
The workers’ unrest is the most visible part of a complex array of problems that is roiling the Darjeeling hills and the region’s tea industry. Many consider Darjeeling tea to be among the finest in the world. The colonial British government was the first to plant tea bushes in Darjeeling, beginning in the mid-1800s. The region’s tea plantations grew steadily until they became the backbone of the local economy.
In recent decades, tea production in the district peaked at around 14 million kg in 1990. However, this number has seen a decline. According to data published by the Tea Board of India, Darjeeling produced only 5.6 million kg of tea in 2024. The factors behind the decrease are varied – from climate change, which is impacting yields, to competition from tea grown in Nepal, which is dampening demand for Darjeeling tea.
As companies struggle to turn profits, many are failing to pay workers fairly and on time, leaving them to face the brunt of the problem. A 2022 parliamentary committee report noted, “The abject working and inhumane living conditions of tea labourers is reminiscent of the indentured labour introduced in colonial times by British planters.”
Some tea estate owners are exploring alternate business models, from tea tourism to artisanal tea production. Pranab Mukhia, creator of the well-known Moonlight tea and former manager at Thurbo tea estate, told Scroll that the future seems to lie in including workers as stakeholders in the production of tea. “Such partnerships can introduce a sense of pride and ownership amongst workers and revive the industry,” he said.
But on the ground, these ventures have a long way to go before they can offer hope to workers, many of whom are leaving Darjeeling to work in distant corners of the country.
Scroll emailed the tea estates that workers had criticised for low and delayed payment, and poor working terms. This story will be updated if any respond.
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Not all tea that grows in Darjeeling district can be officially sold as Darjeeling tea. In 2004, Darjeeling tea became the first Indian product to receive the Geographical Indication tag, a type of intellectual property protection that recognises and ties a product’s unique characteristics to a specific region. Under this protection, there are only 87 tea gardens “spread over 17,500 hectares of land” in the district that can legitimately produce Darjeeling tea.
The first harvest of Darjeeling tea in a year, known as the first flush, typically occurs from late February to late April. The flavour of this tea is light and delicate. The second flush is harvested between early May and mid-June, and has a stronger, muscatel flavour.
These two flushes account for almost half the year’s revenue for tea estates. They are followed by the monsoon flush, harvested in September, and the autumn flush, harvested in November.
This production has been hit by climate change. A 2024 paper on the subject noted, “the rise in temperatures has caused a reduction in tea output despite an overall rise in rainfall”. It also observed that, “the required rainfall and temperature were not occurring in the required months in the study area, and hence, the tea yield declined over the years”.
The paper also said that the quality of the tea was being affected. “The specific blend of temperature, rainfall, and humidity conditions and seasonal patterns that contribute to the taste of Darjeeling tea is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate shifts,” it stated.
This year, too, tea estate owners and managers were dismayed by protracted dry spells during the first flush. “In order to grow the perfect Darjeeling tea, the plants need both sunshine and rain periodically. But this year in January and February, for the first flush, we had a drought-like situation, which deteriorates the quality of the tea,” said Ravindra Chowdhury, the general manager of Jungpana tea estate.
The changing climatic conditions are not only retarding tea production – they are also taking a toll on workers.
One sunny afternoon in early April, 39-year-old tea estate worker Sudha Tamang was plucking tea leaves at Rington tea estate, also in Kurseong block, when she felt that she was about to faint. “My blood pressure had fallen, and I felt feverish too,” said Tamang. “I started feeling very weak and so I returned home.”
Tamang, whose mother too worked at the plantation before her, blames her illness on the heat. “It was so hot, probably around 28 or 29 degrees,” she said. “The sun was glaring down at us and there was no shade nearby.”
Tamang said that it had never been unusual for workers to fall sick. But over the years, she felt that changes in weather patterns had led to a higher number of them facing health troubles more frequently.
This increases the economic burden on them. “There are days when it gets too hot to work, so we skip work and miss out on our wages,” she said.
Until the early 1990s, Darjeeling tea had a reliable market in the Soviet Union: up to 1991, the country bought more than half of India’s exported tea. According to one report that cited the Tea Board of India, in the tea season between 1991 and 1992, India sold tea worth 400 million pounds to the country.
But the country’s dissolution led to a crash in this sale – the report stated that in the next season, “purchases by the newly independent republics fell to 160 million pounds”. One government assessment noted that as competition from other countries, including China and Indonesia, rose, India “lost the Russian market”.
More recently, the tea industry in the region was hit by sociopolitical strife. In 2017, the Gorkha community in the region held a workers’ strike that lasted more than one hundred days, demanding a separate state for the Nepali-speaking community. A large number of tea estate workers in Darjeeling belong to the Gorkha community – thus the strike seriously hit tea production in the region.
“The industry never fully recovered from it,” said Chowdhury, the tea estate manager.
Data from the Tea Board of India bears out this assertion. While Darjeeling saw production of 8.48 million kg of tea in 2014-’15, the output crashed to 3.21 million kg in 2017-’18. While production improved in subsequent years, the highest output the region has seen since then is 7.85 million kg in 2019-’20. Last year it only produced around 6 million kg of tea.
The overall decline in the region’s production also allowed tea grown in Nepal to carve out a share of the Indian and international market. In fact, the 2022 parliamentary report notes the problem of “large volumes of inferior tea originating from Nepal being wrongfully branded as Darjeeling tea”. As a result, it stated, “the premium prices of authentic Darjeeling tea in the global markets is experiencing an undercut”.
Tea producers are troubled by this competition. Sparsh Agarwal, co-founder of Dorje tea, whose family owns Selim Hill Tea Estate in Darjeeling, estimated that today, one in five cups of tea sold as Darjeeling tea “actually come from Darjeeling, the rest are all being smuggled in from Nepal”.
Agarwal argued that Nepal tea differed from Darjeeling tea due to the region’s different terroir, which refers to a combination of factors such as “altitude, soil, crop type, micro local climatic conditions, the biodiversity of the region, and the tradition of tea making”.
And yet, because it is grown at the same elevation, using clones of the same tea plants grown in Darjeeling, Nepal tea has emerged as a strong competitor. “The average person can’t tell the difference between Darjeeling tea and Nepal tea,” he said.
In fact, Mukhia said, cultivation practices in Nepal benefited the tea in some ways. “In Darjeeling, you have workers plucking leaves from a particular area on the same day and they are supervised by the management,” he said. This helped ensure that teas had consistent flavour profiles, since several factors on the ground, such as the direction and amount of sunlight that plants received, affected flavour.
By contrast, “in Nepal you have small tea farmers who pluck a little on one day and then another day”. As a result, he said, “The tea leaves are all mixed so this makes them better for blends.”
Another advantage that Nepal tea had over Darjeeling tea, Mukhia noted, was that tea bushes in Nepal were much younger than those in Darjeeling.
“The average yield of tea per hectare in Nepal must be around 1,000 kg,” he said. “But in Darjeeling, tea bushes have grown old since they were first planted in the mid-1800s. They only produce about 350-400 kg.”
Many estates have not replanted their tea bushes for several years, he added, because it takes about eight years to break even after this work is carried out. Moreover, he noted, replantation can also contribute to soil erosion.
The crisis in the tea industry in Darjeeling has sharpened the conflict between workers and tea estate owners.
Tea garden workers point out that low wages have made their lives precarious. Indeed, the parliamentary report noted, “the blatant violation of socio-economic justice wherein the labourers of the tea sector, with a high prevalence of female workers, have to endure an abysmal and dismal life with no access to basic amenities and living standards”.
Despite having spent their lives working in the estates, workers have no rights over the land on which they live. Management rules dictate that every household needs one worker to be working at the tea estate in order to retain housing.
Sudha Tamang lives with her ageing mother in a tiny, two-room shanty made of scrap metal. Tamang has worked at Rington since 2014 – at the time she received a paltry sum of Rs 70 a day. While pressure from workers’ unions resulted in a rise in the wage rate – she now earns Rs 250 per day – this is still 30% less than the minimum daily wage of Rs 323 for unskilled labour in West Bengal.
Besides, Tamang said, workers like her are increasingly denied small provisions and benefits that they were once given. “Earlier we used to receive gumboots, raincoats, umbrellas and firewood for cooking from the tea estate, but now they’ve all but stopped,” Sudha said. “We’re not getting pensions or PFs. I don’t know what will happen when I retire.”
Estate managers acknowledge that they are unable to retain workers. Over the years, children of estate workers have migrated in search of other jobs. Mukhia recalled that a few years ago, the estate conducted an age profile of the workers and found that the average age was 48 years, only a decade away from the official retirement age.
“Nobody wants to work for Rs 250 a day,” he said. “It’s only the older generation which continues to work. The younger generation is doing other labour work by migrating. Those who have gotten educated are entering the hospitality and airline industries. They’re migrating to the big cities and even abroad to places like Dubai.”
Workers, meanwhile, argue that the disinclination to work on estates is unsurprising given that employers’ refuse to abide by regulations. Although the West Bengal plantation labour rules state that workers are allowed to avail 14 days of sick leave in a year, Tamang Sudha was only granted three days of sick leave when she recently fell ill. “I had to rest at home for some nine-ten days, but I was only paid three days of wages,” she said.
They also complained of other kinds of injustice that they suffer at the hands of their management.
Sumendra noted, for instance, that it was not uncommon for staff to intentionally misspell workers’ names or other details in their records, and then demand bribes to make corrections. “For instance, in the estate’s records they’ll record your surname as Lamang instead of Tamang or get your birthdate wrong,” he said. “Because of that the worker will have to keep running around and pay bribes to get these details corrected.”
Pariyar is among those workers who said they have been asked for bribes. “When I go to demand my PF they ask me to pay them a bribe of Rs 2,000,” she said. “If my health fails I might have to join an ashram.”
Some tea producers, meanwhile, are examining ways to resuscitate the industry. Sparsh Agarwal noted that most tea estates had no proper distribution networks and were reliant on traders to sell their tea. In 2021 he co-founded Dorje teas with his partner Ishaan Kanoria, which directly supplies tea to buyers online without using middlemen. “We wanted to create our own distribution channel so that it could be a producer-led model where the money comes in directly to the estate,” he said.
In a similar vein Rajah Banerjee, former owner of the Makaibari tea estate, has shifted his focus to small tea growers. In 2018, Banerjee started Rimpocha Tea, which produces artisanal tea in collaboration with small tea growers. “The focus is on partnership and not ownership,” he said. Mukhia too observed that the future seems to lie in including workers as stakeholders in the production of tea. “Such partnerships can introduce a sense of pride and ownership amongst workers and revive the industry,” he said.
But such efforts are limited in their scope and will need time if they are to expand in scale. Government efforts, meanwhile, have left workers sorely dissatisfied.
The parliamentary report includes a few recommendations on how to address the crisis in the tea industry, including establishing a government quality control lab to verify the standards of imported tea, and investigating the dumping of tea from Nepal. It also recommended “decent living wages” and the enactment of a law “which recognizes the rights and ownership of small and marginalised tea workers to their ancestral lands and resources”.
But workers argue that these recommendations have largely been ignored and that the policies that have been implemented have, instead, hurt the tea industry.
In 2013, the West Bengal state government introduced a Tea Tourism Policy in Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling, aimed at “generating investments and employment opportunities for sustainable and inclusive economic development” in the tea gardens.
At the time, the policy restricted the land that could be used from a tea estate to develop tourist stays to only 5% of the estate. But in 2019, the state government renamed the policy the Tea Tourism and Allied Business Policy, and allowed up to 15% of “unutilised and fallow land” for business activities including “Tea tourism, Plantation, Animal husbandry, Hydro Power, Non-conventional Energy Resources, Social Infrastructure and Services”.
On February 5 this year, in a contentious move, West Bengal’s chief minister Mamta Banerjee announced at the Bengal Global Business Summit that the portion of land that could be used for “non-tea purposes” would be increased to 30% of tea garden land.
Civil society and trade unions in north Bengal opposed the announcement vociferously. “On the ground, most tea gardens don’t have 30% fallow land which can be used for other purposes,” said Chewang Yonzon, secretary of the Hill Plantations Employees Union. “Whatever development activities have occurred have resulted in tea bushes being uprooted to make space. Climate change is already impacting tea production. Won’t uprooting more plants make it worse?”
While more than 15 business proposals are currently being processed by the state, two luxury hotels have already opened up under the policy – the Taj Chia Kutir in Makai Bari tea estate in 2020 and the Mayfair tea resort in New Chumta tea estate in 2022.
Workers claimed that these businesses have not abided by protections that the policy put in place for them. Specifically, the policy has explicit rules stating that “there shall be no reduction in the area under tea plantation and retrenchment of existing labour force engaged” in tea gardens, and that employment from a new project “must be generated in a manner that 80% of local people get opportunity and are absorbed. Preference shall be given to the wards of the workers of the concerned tea garden.”
In New Chumta, workers alleged these rules were not followed.
“At first, we were told that the hotel would only use 5% of the land but it kept on expanding. They uprooted a lot of tea bushes to make space for it,” said Jyoti, a worker from the estate, who like everyone Scroll spoke to at New Chumta, requested anonymity for fear of retaliation by the management.
Workers complained that even as these hotels charge extravagant prices, they struggle with similar problems as workers in other gardens – for instance, they said that they did not receive their wages on time, and that their provident fund payments were not being deposited. “A room here costs about Rs 10,000 a night whereas us workers continue to get Rs 220 a day,” Jyoti said.
But what irks Jyoti the most is the management’s reneging on its promise that “all our children would receive jobs at the upcoming hotel”.
In late 2022, Maria, the daughter of tea workers at the estate, was excited to hear about interviews for jobs at the resort. She had just finished a master’s degree in commerce and had also taken additional computer training. “I clearly remember the day of the interview, I asked them for a desk job, but they told me that there was no such work, and my only options were in housekeeping or food and beverages,” she said.
Maria said that she encountered what appeared to be a bias against her. After her interview, she said, a non-Adivasi Bengali woman was interviewed. “They asked her if she would be able to answer calls as a receptionist and operate a computer,” she recalled. “She refused, saying she had no prior experience in either task.”
She recounted that between 15 and 20 Adivasi youth from New Chumta were interviewed – none got a job commensurate with their college qualifications. In all, she said, today around 20 Adivasis from estate workers’ families work at the resorts, none of them in an office.
Maria took the housekeeping job for two months, but she left because she was not used to manual work. She recalled that she had a conversation around this time with her mother, who said, “I have worked hard my whole life in the tea garden to educate you. All work is respectable, but if you are made to do the same kind of work as me, then what was the point of educating you?”
