Most of the deaths occur in plantations that have closed down, some 20 so far. The owners do not take any responsibility for their abandoned workforce. Legally workers are supposed to get some support from the State government which of late has started supplying rice at Rs 2 per kilo in some areas. The only problem: this rice is often full of maggots, unfit for consumption .It is mostly refused by the locals.

More alarming than the deaths themselves, for which the Trinamool Congress (TMC) Ministers stoutly deny any responsibility, is the callous indifference and insensitivity of the State and Central Governments. Some token visits by local administrators to the bereaved families and a pittance of financial assistance that lasts a few days, constitute the sum and substance of ‘official help’.

Most pictures of victims used by the local press usually depict old, utterly emaciated men and women surrounded by dumb, grim-faced children, themselves suffering from acute malnutrition !’Sometimes, it seems the Bengal famine is here again,’ admits a senior Siliguri-based scribe.

The state Ministers always rush into a stout denial mode as Left and other members try to raise such issues in the State Assembly. To date, there has not been a single debate in the house over the crisis affecting the tea industry.Ministers cut short queries from the opposition routinely claiming that the deaths had occurred from either ‘drinking or from long standing ailments .’

When a PIL was filed at the Kolkata High Court on the subject by public spirited citizens, it took a stern rebuke from the judges to silence counsels representing the state Government. When they claimed that uncontrolled drinking habits were a major cause for the plantation deaths, Justice Joymalya Bacghi admonished them saying’ You don’t have to rub salt into the wound!’

Realities of the situation favour plantation owners. Compared to the daily wages in the plantations of Assam or South India of around Rs 250 to Rs 300, the local going rate in Bengal is only Rs 114-120. Local Trade Unions (TU) have been agitating against this, but the State‘s Labour department, apart from occasionally appealing to the employers, has done little.

Under the TMC Government, the Labour department functions somewhat differently, abandoning its earlier more assertive postures. Instead of calling a conference at the bipartite or tripartite level to discuss the problems comprehensively, as was done under the Left Front Ministry, these days the Minister simply tells both management and workers, ’It will be best if both of you sit down for a discussion and settle your differences.’ The TUs try to argue their case, the employers point to the increasing sickness and loss of earnings from their plantations --- and nothing follows. The Ministry hardly plays a role.

TU sources allege that the Government follows the same approach over all industrial closures, whether of jute mills or engineering units that occur these days, leaving everything to the chambers of Commerce and the TUs. ‘Sometimes we wonder whether the TMC has any reason to maintain a Ministry for Labour at all,’ says a CITU spokesman.

It may be argued that the state Government policy regarding issues relating to labour etc is, if nothing else, consistent. Over 80 poor farmers are known to have committed suicide due to the failure of their crop, the poor prices of their products, natural calamities or for other reasons during the last four years. But the Government does not take the slightest notice. It strongly denies that there has been any suicide at all among farmers! This, at a time when opposition-run papers and the media as a whole have published lists of victims giving a district-wise break up !

Ms Banerjee once stated during an Assembly session that only one farmer had killed himself because he had secured a Re 1 crore loan from a Burdwan bank and failed to repay! She did not mention the victim’s name or other details. ‘No wonder. I do not think there is a single farmer of that stature in West Bengal, who could secure such a huge commercial loan from any bank in the state,’ said a CPI(M) leader.

North Bengal-based observers are worried about a different aspect of the crisis in West Bengal tea industry. The acute ongoing march of death among the poorer workers has given rise to other socio-economic evils, such as child and women trafficking. As to be expected, some NGOs active in the region have studied the situation and reported their alarming findings to a section of the Bengal-based press. As for the State Government, there has not any follow-up action.

There are reports from North Bengal, from especially the Dooars and other areas that organised interstate gangs of operators with powerful political backing have been luring many women and children in acute distress away to other states, taking advantage of their miseries and official callousness. One NGO reports that from April to December 2015, volunteers have rescued over 300 boys and girls, who had been illegally trafficked to other parts of the country.

By simple rule of thumb, it is assumed that for every person rescued, at least five times more people have been trafficked. Spokesmen of the left wing Cha Bagan Mazdor Union and other sources say that the matter had been discussed at a joint forum of workers’ organisations. They are carrying out an awareness campaign in the distress-hit areas among the people.

What makes their task difficult is that there is a genuine exodus for work to other states among the plantation workers of West Bengal, for whom life is getting more and more difficult. This is seen as a natural development in the region. It is different for men, but where women workers also leave the state ostensibly for a job and better life, except for a few persons, it is difficult to check who is going exactly where with whom. Many are being lured away with apparently better job offers elsewhere, only to end up as sex workers in Delhi, Mumbai as before , although many have been traced in Bangalore and Ahmedabad of late.

The phenomenon has been more noticeable during the TMC rule. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported in 2013 that in south Asia, the highest number of women and children were being trafficked illegally from West Bengal. In 2013 alone, over 19,000 women and children went missing, of whom it was possible to trace only 6000 later. The rest remained missing. (IPA Service)