Evidently, it made not the slightest difference to the extremely poor victims, mostly tribals and some Nepalis that during the period indicated, the Centre was ruled by the Congress and associate parties until the BJP took over in 2014. Bengal too witnessed a major change in 2011 as the Marxist-led Government was ousted from power by a resurgent Trinamool Congress (TMC). Left, Right-wing or Centrist, no party paid much attention to the plight of plantation labourers, the poorest of the poor.

With tea plantations in Darjeeling, the Dooars and Terai regions numbering 450, West Bengal is the second highest producer of tea, second only to Assam. Trinamool Congress leaders from the Chief Minister of West Bengal downwards, remain firmly locked in a denial mode. Minister for Food, Jyotipriya Mullick, and Minister for Labour, Moloy Ghatak, for instance, dismiss all distress reports. They stoutly maintain that the labourers, not paid any salary for months and years now, have died of ‘diseases related to old age or poor health conditions’. This even as daily reports reach the spanking new Secretariat, Nabanna building, in Kolkata, more suggestive of a long-drawn famine.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee claims to have visited North Bengal ‘scores of times’, taking a dig at her predecessor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who avoided the hills because of the Gorkhaland agitation. But she has addressed this life and death issue (more death than life, say her opponents) for physically emaciated plantation workers only ONCE - that too during the last fortnight!

During her North Bengal visits, she had been far too busy selecting sites for tourism spots, taking walks near Darjeeling beauty spots early in the morning, local officials dutifully following, sponsoring celebrations among Lepchas, Bhutiyas and other groups at state expense, dancing with the hill tribals, or addressing public rallies in the hills.

But she scrupulously avoided the famine-affected plantations in the Terai and Dooars, most of which have been deserted by their management. “During the past decade, the management of 116 gardens have changed hands, as profits began to decline’, says a North Bengal Labour leader.

‘The state Government is doing all it can to help plantation workers. It has asked for an explanation from the owner of several tea gardens, G.P. Goenka. A Rs 100 crore special fund has been set up to help the workers. If the owners cannot run their units, the state government will take over. The centre has done nothing,’ Mrs Banerjee said. She announced that workers would receive rice and wheat at Rs 2 a kilo from now on, with the state government providing subsidy for them. Later, it was declared that they would have to pay only 45 paise for a kilo of rice!

The only problem: that to this day, no state official has disclosed just how many people have actually received the foodgrains at the prices mentioned, in which areas and plantations.

As scenes reminiscent of the Bengal famine of 1943 stalk the tea gardens, the issue is naturally getting politicised. Over 600,000 people work in the plantations in Bengal. They constitute a sizable chunk of voters. In 2011, they shifted their support from the Left to the TMC. However, in 2014 LS polls, they mostly supported the BJP.

As the 2016 Assembly elections approach, the choice before the underfed and dying breed of labourers has become difficult - as stated before, hardly any party really supported their cause! But they can swing the results in 42 out of 294 Assembly seats.

Says Siliguri’s Leftist Mayor Ashok Bhattacharya, ’The TMC-run state government is more keen to suppress details and understate the extent of the crisis in the plantations, even scores of deaths do not matter to them.’

Tea Association of India (TAI) sources claim that 2015 has been a very difficult year. It costs around Rs 175 at least to produce a kilo of tea in Terai or Dooars. But average prices at auctions were only Rs 128.50 for Dooars and Rs 104.84 for Terai, per kilo! Such losses could not be sustained over long periods. Referring to the lower daily wages earned by NB tea workers, ranging between Rs 100/120 only, whereas in Assam Kerala, Tamil Nadu etc they were well over Rs 200/230, management spokesmen point to the advantages that North Bengal workers enjoy, such as schools, hospitals and housing provided by garden owners. These are available nowhere else in India for them.

Left labour leaders dispute this strongly. ‘Such facilities exist only in name, mostly flimsy structures are put up n the name of housing. As for the health services and schools, etc, the less said the better.’ They point out that the special Rs 100 crore fund was not meant to help the poor workers, as claimed by the TMC, but actually a package meant for the owners and managers of some plantations!

More damagingly for India’s image, scandalous accounts from North Bengal have spread to neighbouring countries as well. India’s Consul General in Bhutan, Piyush Gupta recently said at a meeting in Binaguri that he had heard the shocking details of the situation prevailing in the North Bengal gardens. He hoped things would improve now that both the State and the centre had taken note of the situation.

Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had visited the gardens before Mamata Banerjee did. She blamed the state government for not doing much to help the workers.

Banerjee’s veiled threat to the management of the gardens about the state government taking over plantations did not cut much ice. Death and distress has been reported from some gardens already taken over by the state Government. Not to be outdone, the Centre has just announced that it would take over at least seven plantations.

TAI sources point out that without expert help and guidance, major structural changes in the plantations and achieving more effective production would not be possible. Government officials or political leaders, whether at the Centre or in the states, did not possess any specialisation in tea production or plantation management. It was highly likely that eventually the gardens would be returned to their former owners or to new entrepreneurs without much of a record in the tea industry.

As things stand, all that the poor tribals toiling in the North Bengal tea gardens cannot hope for more than some cheap rice (said to be mostly unfit for human consumption, incidentally) and wheat, apart from high flown political rhetoric, in the days and weeks ahead. (IPA Service)