Bangladesh tea workers: A legacy of neglect and servitude

A worker at a tea estate in Srimangal in Bangladesh's Moulvibazar district. Despite a production boom, tea workers live a life of misery due to poor wages and denial of basic rights. (Photo: Stephan Uttom/UCA News)

It's been nearly three decades and counting since Sabuj Tanti started working as a laborer at Khadim Tea Estate in the Sylhet district of northeast Bangladesh.

"This is our ancestral profession and we have no vocational skills. That's why we have been stuck here for more than 150 years," he told UCA News.

Sabuj, 43, a lower-caste Hindu from Tanti community, is the fifth generation of tea workers from his family. Yet this father of four daughters wants all his children to get out of the tea estate. Three of his daughters, except the youngest of two-and-half years-old, go to school.

"I don't want my daughters to become tea workers like me. I want them to get an education and have a better life. I didn't have the opportunity to get an education, so I have been stuck in the tea estate forever," he said.

Sabuj sees no future in the tea industry under the current circumstances.

For tea workers, there’s no place to call home

I’ve just come back from northwestern Sylhet, a hilly and densely forested region famous for its tea plantations.

The poor souls who work on them could well be the ultimate definition of “displaced people.”

They were brought there from various Indian states after the British colonists set up the first tea gardens in the 1850’s. Almost all of them were landless tribespeople. They were told they would be taken to a beautiful place where they could find a home and be richly rewarded for shaking a lovely plant; a story not far from the yarn that many modern day traffickers spin.

In reality, their homes were – as they are now - unsanitary mud-walled homes called ‘worker lines.’

The daily wage is 48 taka (about 50 cents) plus a meager daily ration of food and a minimal amount of medical care. And the house is theirs only as long as one of the family has a job there. If that person dies, they face a very uncertainty future.

Some of them are Catholics and the Church has been battling constantly for the last 60 years to set up schools for them. The plantation owners positively discourage education, for fear that it will make the workers discontented.

And all the time, the business is declining. Tea, the second most popular beverage in the world after water, was once a major export of Bangladesh. But those days are gone. Out of a total annual production of 50 million kgs, only 10 million are exported. If for any reason a tea garden or factory is closed, the family has no option but to go begging.

They have no other vocational skills. And they no longer have roots. Since the partition of India in 1946 and Bangladesh liberation in 1971 most of them have forgotten their language and lost touch with their original culture.

It’s ironic that you often see photos and videos of women plucking tea leaves. They’re used in calendars and advertisements and they look colorful and charming. Very few people know what their everyday reality is.