Indian Tea Pickers Risk Death for a Dollar a Day

JORHAT, India, Jan. 2, 2008 — -- Standing barefoot in her muddy front yard with one grandchild on her hip and two others trailing close behind her, Bihumoni Jatap said she works on a nearby tea plantation for about $1 a day.

With that money, she provides for nine members of her family. Jatap's daughter used to contribute to the family income, but she died, along with 200 others over the past several months from what is believed to be contaminated drinking water on many of the region's tea estates. Sixty percent of India's tea comes from the tea plantations in this remote far eastern state.

In October, the minister of health in Assam made the unusual move of threatening to bring homicide charges against the tea plantation owners for killing their workers with contaminated water.

"With our existing tea plantation act, it is the duty of the tea garden owners to [provide drinking water], but because their business is not good, they stopped those sanitations with drinking water so cholera and diarrhea came in a big way," said Himanta Sarma, health minister of Assam.

But the tea plantation owners say that it is the government's responsibility to address any issues.

"They are not dying from the drinking water we provide," said Prodip Bordoloi, manager of the Cinnamara Tea Estate. "This is a government concern."

Tea laborers spend up to 12 hours, six days a week picking — or "plucking" — the tea leaves, maintaining the tea bushes or working in the tea-processing plants for about 50 rupees. The low wages are minimally offset by the Tea Plantation Act, which states that plantations must provide cheap food, shelter and water for registered workers and their immediate dependents.

But a short walk through two villages near one of the tea estates revealed barely standing shacks full of holes, and one source of drinking water, which was actually a pond covered in lily pads and weeds.

"I know that we will get sick from this water," said Bisamoni Kumar, through an interpreter. "But there is no where else to get it."

In an area this poor, each income contribution — no matter how small — is essential to the survival of the family. For Sninath Tanta, the death of his 16- and 18-year-old daughters from the drinking water is sad, but even worse, he said, is that their lost wages put his own life at risk. His daughters' deaths mean that he is now dependent solely upon the income of his rickshaw-pulling son. Tanta can no longer support himself because his right knee is broken from years of plantation work.

Lakhi Tanti's wife worked on tea plantations for 30 years. Like five others in their village of 100, she died after suffering from diarrhea and vomiting. Tanti lives across from the well that he believes supplied the water that killed his wife. When asked why he still takes his water from the same well, he said there is no where else to get water.

"My wife died, so I will [likely] get sick, too," he said.

The state representative for Unicef in Assam, Jeroo Master, said that most of these deaths stem from acute diarrhea disease, but that a few isolated cases were from cholera. Master said there have been no reported deaths from the water since early November, but even late last month at least one woman in the village of Purna showed the same symptoms as the others who died in her village.