Poverty perpetuates trafficking in Assam’s tea gardens

Maitreyee Boruah, Indiaspend.org/FactChecker.in

The tiny courtyard of tea-garden worker Bilchand Bawri’s house in Assam’s Koilamari tea estate turns into a makeshift school every day at 4 p.m. Around 15 children, aged between five and 13, sit on plastic sheets on the ground as Bawri’s daughter, Rinku, teaches them.

Twenty-one-year-old Rinku is a graduate student at a college in North Lakhimpur town. She commutes 15 km each way by bus to attend college. When she is short on cash, she misses her classes as she can’t afford to pay her commute charges.

“Nor can I afford to stay in a hostel close to my college,” Rinku, who belongs to the Adivasi community, says. “My parents are tea-garden labourers earning Rs 250 each every day. It is not enough to run a household of seven, including my four siblings.”

Rinku’s struggle to get an education reflects the abject poverty of the Adivasi community, the backbone of Assam’s biggest revenue-generating industry.

A bitter brew: No share of profits for the poor

Assam’s tea tribe or Adivasi community is an umbrella term for people belonging to Munda, Santhal, Gonds, Oraon, Bhumij and other tribes. They comprise around 7 million of the 31.2 million people in the northeastern state.

According to the Assam government’s Industries and Commerce Department, the state produces nearly 700 million kg of tea annually, accounting for around half of India’s overall tea production. Along with gaining global fame for its high-quality tea, Assam makes big bucks from the green leaves. India earned Rs 6,386 crore by exporting tea in 2022-23 and Assam contributed to a sizeable chunk of it.

The 200-year-old industry has been built on the labour of Adivasi labourers. While men are predominantly involved in the factories, women are the primary workers in the gardens. Be it sun or rain, they are on their feet for 8 to 12 hours carefully collecting the leaf sets that consist of two leaves and a bud. Typically, workers collect 20-60 kg a day depending on the season. The price of tea begins at Rs 180 per kilogram and can go up to Rs 10,000 for some varieties.

“Our community never got any share of the profit,” says Adivasi woman leader Neha Sagar from Tinsukia district’s Beesakopie tea estate. “We have always been living on the margins. It is a classic case of capitalism where the working class is exploited to the maximum for generations.”

How denial of education makes girls vulnerable to violence

Rinku has been teaching her students for free for four years now. She fears that if these children are not helped with their lessons, they will join the long list of school dropouts residing in more than 800 major and 100,000 small tea gardens across Assam.

The lack of neighbourhood schools is a major reason for the high dropout rate. An April 2017 study, by Ruksana Saikia, a research scholar at the Gauhati University, found that educational opportunities in tea garden areas are limited to lower primary levels.

Activists say the high dropout rate is behind the rising cases of child trafficking and child marriage of girls in tea garden areas. “This is how the cycle of violence against Adivasi girls starts,” says Nabin Chandra Keot, vice president of Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS), the largest trade union body of tea garden workers in Assam.

“It continues throughout their lives. Crimes against women and girls like domestic violence, human trafficking, sexual abuse and dowry deaths are prevalent in tea gardens,” Keot says. “Unfortunately, we don’t talk about them and there is hardly any reporting of these incidents.”

Over the decades, more and more Adivasi men have started migrating outside the plantations in search of better wages. This makes the women and girl children, who are left behind, vulnerable to abuse.

Low wages perpetuate poverty, trafficking

“The tea garden workers have a giant problem–grinding poverty. Everything else gets eclipsed in front of deprivation,” says Keot in his Dibrugarh office. “It is also the cause of several problems including gender violence. Who will talk about nari nirjotona (gender-based violence) when your daily earning from a physically demanding job is between Rs 150-Rs 250?”

About 144 big tea gardens surround Dibrugarh. After a Rs 18 hike last year, Assam garden workers in Brahmaputra valley get Rs 250 a day and their counterparts in Barak valley get Rs 228. Some workers, in small tea gardens, get even less — between Rs 150 and Rs 180.

The ACMS has been demanding that the daily wage of tea workers be increased to Rs 350. In Kerala, another centre for tea cultivation, a plantation worker earns Rs 482 per day, the second highest in the country. Sikkim with only one tea garden named Temi Tea Garden pays Rs 500 per day, the highest in the country, to the workers.

Back in the Koilamari tea estate, 130 km from Dibrugarh, Milika Topno, a research scholar, says poverty and a high school dropout rate force girls to leave their homes to earn a livelihood.

“They are victims of human trafficking,” says Topno, who belongs to the tea tribe community. “The trafficked girls are employed in homes, factories and brothels. Some become child brides or organ donors. These girls are subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Many others join their mothers and grandmothers and work in tea gardens. Others get married before adulthood.”

The Koilamari tea estate in Lakhimpur district is famous for its orthodox tea, which is processed using traditional methods. It is spread across 1,244 hectares. Around 3,000 Adivasi families stay within the estate, locals say. The verdant tea garden, on the north bank of the Brahmaputra river, has a beauty that is in striking contrast to the lives of tea garden workers and their families.

Sonali and Priyanka (name changed) are 19 years old. They are neighbours, and studied till grade VIII before they dropped out of school due to financial problems. Both girls were trafficked to Naharlagun, in neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh, in 2022.

Priyanka says an agent (trafficker) — whose name she did not want to reveal as she is scared of being targeted — took her to Naharlagun in September 2022.

“Our household finances have been bad for years,” Priyanka says. “I was sitting idle at home after leaving school. My parents’ earnings are too little for a family of six. I was told by the agent that I have to do household chores and will be paid Rs 8,000 monthly. I thought the money was good and I could send it to my parents.”

In Naharlagun, a suburb in Arunachal Pradesh’s capital Itanagar, Priyanka was made to work round the clock. “I did everything — from cleaning and cooking to attending to a baby,” Priyanka recalls. “I had no time to rest. I was verbally abused. It was a scary experience. I could not bear it and left the job in two months. Thankfully, my employers let me come home. But they did not pay me. They told me the agent took my two months’ salary (Rs 16,000). After I reached home, I tried to get in touch with the agent but he never answered my calls.”

Activists say trafficking has become industrialised in bagaans (plantations); the traffickers are often local people, and families trust them with their daughters to help them find a job.

“The trust is always broken, as many girls don’t return home and go missing or those who return have a sordid saga to narrate,” says Karisma Lakra, a community worker associated with Purva Bharati Educational Trust, an Assam-based NGO working for girls’ education in tea gardens.

“These agents either run away if anyone confronts them, or threaten the girls and their parents to keep quiet. The agents sell these girls to faraway places like Delhi, Rajasthan, Mumbai and Gujarat,” she adds.

Sonali had left, with another female friend, for Naharalagun in February 2022 to work as a domestic help. “My friend worked in the house of a politician in Naharlagun. A relative of the politician hired me. I worked there for almost two years. As I started to miss my parents, I decided to come back home,” said Sonali.

Her neighbours say the teenager has probably developed some form of addiction during her stay in Naharlagun. “I have seen her consuming packet after packet of gutka (a tobacco-based substance),” says a neighbour, who did not want to be identified.

“Most of the time she sleeps,” Sonali’s mother says. “She hardly speaks to us. I fear she had some bad experience. But she insists she was treated well and paid Rs 4,000 a month. She also sent us some money for a few months.”

As the Koilamari tea estate is close to Itanagar (around 70 km), several girls from the plantation are trafficked to the neighbouring state where they work as domestic help. Across Arunachal Pradesh, Adivasi girls of Assam are employed as domestic workers. They are called ‘bhonti’, an Assamese term for younger sister. But in Arunachal Pradesh, it refers to a female domestic worker, almost always an Adivasi minor.

Data show the tip of the iceberg

Data shared with IndiaSpend by the Office of the Director General of Police, Itanagar, show that 14 cases of human trafficking were registered in Arunachal Pradesh from 2019 to September 2023.

The first information reports (FIRs) filed in these cases resulted in the rescue of 22 victims and the arrest of 21 traffickers. Most victims belong to the Adivasi community of Assam.

In March 2023, the Assam government told the legislative assembly that at least 481 children — 185 boys and 574 girls — were trafficked between 2017 and 2022 to different parts of the country. Moreover, 759 children have gone missing since 2017. At least 666 of them were subsequently rescued.

The latest report of the National Crime Records Bureau stated there were 204 victims in 108 cases of human trafficking registered in 2022 in Assam. In 2021, there were 379 victims of human trafficking as compared to 151 victims in 2020. Human trafficking is prohibited under Article 23(1) of the Indian Constitution.

Officials working to combat trafficking in Assam, who did not want to be named, say the state is “vulnerable because of its geographical location (it shares a porous 267.5-km border with Bangladesh), inaccessible terrain, decades of political turmoil and violence, poverty, displacement due to floods and lack of infrastructure, health facilities and educational institutions”.

Tea gardens turn trafficking hubs

“The tea gardens have become trafficking hubs because they have several vulnerability indicators. The practice has been going on forever,” says Assam-based activist Digambar Narzary, who works for the rescue and rehabilitation of trafficking victims. Narzary runs a shelter home, Nedan Foundation, for victims of trafficking in Kokrajhar.

There are 35 girls in the shelter home. More than half are Adivasi girls. “The Adivasi girls were trafficked across the country on the pretext of giving them ‘decent jobs’. Most have experienced sexual violence, including rape. They are all given counselling,” adds Narzary.

Kokrajhar, one of the four districts of Assam’s Bodoland Territorial Region, has 30 major tea gardens. The region witnessed decades of Bodo militancy.

Adivasi woman leader Sagar, 25, is a first-generation graduate from her family. She stays with her parents, both tea garden workers. “We have been staying in the same house since the time of my grandparents. We don’t have any legal rights over it, as tea garden managements provide housing facilities to workers,” she says.

“Either my siblings or I have to take up my father or mother’s job after their retirement or we will lose our home. Many graduates have been forced to take up their parents’ jobs to keep a roof over their heads,” adds Sagar.

The workers stay in settlements called Lines within the tea plantations in the upper region and northern Brahmaputra belt of Assam.

Most of these settlements have a similar pattern. There are rows of pucca (concrete structures with tin roofs, mostly built during the 1950s and 1960s) and kutcha (made of clay, bamboo and straw) houses, without electricity and drinking water supply. These homes don’t have access to motorable roads or hospitals.

Raju Sahu, former legislator and an Adivasi leader from Tinsukia, home to around 120 big tea estates, says the tea garden workers are landless labourers.

“Less than 10% of them have land in their names,” Sahu points out. “They don’t have purchasing power. So, we have been conducting protests in various tea estates seeking land rights documents (pattas) for people of the tea community.”

The situation would have been different had the community been included in the Scheduled Tribe (ST) list. It is a long-pending demand awaiting approval from the state government.

The Adivasi community falls under the Other Backward Classes or OBC in Assam, unlike their counterparts in different parts of the country who are STs.

The STs and Other Traditional Dwellers have the right to hold and live on forest land under individual or collective ownership for habitation. ST status for the Adivasis of Assam would offer them rights-based legal benefits like reservations, political representation and socio-economic subsidies.

Dowry demand, domestic violence among landless people

Women rights activists say denial of land and housing rights has led to the rise in dowry demand cases.

“This in turn has increased incidences of domestic violence,” says women’s rights activist Bulbuli Gorh from Jorhat. “In a patriarchal society, women are the easiest target. When a community is denied social, political and economic rights, the burden automatically falls on women. That does not absolve Adivasi men from their greed to become rich by harassing their wives.”

“We often come across incidents where Adivasi men ask for cash, houses and two-wheelers from their brides,” adds Gorh, who belongs to the tea tribe community. “When the wives can’t fulfil the material demands in their in-laws’ places, they are subjected to physical and mental torture.”

Domestic violence is widespread in tea garden settlements. “Often men come home drunk and beat their wives, mothers and daughters. The men take out their frustrations on women,” says Manisha Tanti, a social activist working in Tinsukia’s tea gardens.

“Sometimes, the victims end up in hospital. But talking about domestic violence is considered a taboo. People have become immune to such violence. They think it is a family matter and should not be discussed in public,” she adds.

Despite this, there appears to be growing awareness of the need to see domestic violence as a crime. In their academic paper published in 2022, researchers Swarna Rajagopalan and Natasha Singh Raghuvanshi note that between 2000 and 2020, reporting of violence against women has increased in Assam.

The number of cases of violence within the household and family — under the Dowry Prohibition Act, dowry deaths, cruelty by husband and relatives, and domestic violence — in 2000 was 1,057, they found. This number increased to 12,025 in 2020. Similarly, child marriage cases saw an increase from four in 2014 to 138 in 2020. Rape cases went up from 762 in 2000 to 1,639 in 2020.

Domestic violence: Shattering Adivasi women’s lives

Kanchi Gowala from Letekoojan Tea Estate in Jorhat’s Titabor got married in 2018. Within a year of her marriage, the 31-year-old gave birth to a son.

“I had an arranged marriage. Before our wedding, I had told my husband I had studied till grade II. He is a graduate. At that time he was fine with it. He came across as a well-behaved person. After our marriage, he completely changed. He started verbally abusing me. He called me an illiterate ugly woman. He started beating me every day after getting drunk,” says Gowala.

Her husband started demanding money from her family. “My father died when I was a child. I did not want to burden my mother and elder brother with dowry demands. My refusal to bring money angered him more.

“Sometimes, the beatings turned very violent and left me with injuries. One day, when my son was four months old, I left my in-laws’ place and came to my mother’s house,” she says. Now, Gowala is raising her five-year-old son by working in a tea plantation.

Sonia Tanti, a social activist, accompanied Gowala to the Titabor Police Station to file a complaint against her husband. “We went to the police station four times, but nobody listened to us. The police dissuaded us from pursuing any legal step against the husband despite the victim sustaining grave injuries,” Sonia says.

“Finally, Mariani (another town near Titabor) police station filed an FIR under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (for harassment and dowry demands). But he got anticipatory bail,” she adds.

The sub-divisional magistrate of Titabor directed Gowala’s husband to pay his wife monthly compensation under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005.

Sonia Tanti says it is rare for victims of domestic violence in tea gardens to take legal action against their husbands or in-laws.

“There are many reasons,” she says. “First, the community does not support victims taking a stand against their spouses. Second, the police are unhelpful. Most importantly, victims don’t have the finances to pursue cases. Some can’t even afford the bus fare to visit a nearby police station.”

Unlike Gowala, Sureka Ekka, 40, from Mornai Tea Estate in Kokrajhar, did not have anyone to help her approach the police after she left her husband’s house 15 years ago.

“I got married when I was 20,” Ekka said. “My five years of marriage was hell. My husband beat me black and blue frequently. One day, I decided to stand up for myself and left his house. I had no parental support. Luckily, I got work in the tea garden. Now, I stay alone. I don’t have any children.”

Who will give justice to victims of rape?

In May this year, when I visited Heeleakah Tea Estate, around 15 km from Letekoojan Tea Estate, it was cloudy. Ruma (name changed) works in the estate’s factory. The 29-year-old took a day off from work because, she told me, she wanted to gather her thoughts before speaking about “the worst day of her life”.

“I am telling my story to get justice,” Ruma said. “The incident happened on December 25, 2021. I was alone at home. My parents and siblings went out to celebrate Christmas. It was around 9 p.m. and I went to the washroom built outside the house. My attackers were waiting near the washroom. I did not notice them as it was dark.

“When I came out of the washroom, three men sexually assaulted me. I started screaming for help and then they beat me and tried to strangulate me. An aunt from the neighbourhood heard my screams and she came running. The men ran away seeing her,” she narrates.

The assault left her with severe injuries in her legs and stomach. “On the same night, I was taken to the Jorhat Medical College and Hospital for treatment. I stayed there for three days,” she says.

The Mariani police station registered a case against the three accused under Section 307 (attempt to murder) and Section 354 (for assault). They were arrested and stayed behind bars for three months, but all three are out on bail now. Ruma’s family was pressured by the families of the accused to withdraw the case against them.

After the incident, Ruma developed mental health issues. “The doctors told us she had severe depression and needed to shift her base to feel better,” says her mother. “So, she went to Tamil Nadu’s Tirupur to work as a garment factory worker. She was working as a tailor there. But in a few months, she came back home. We are happy she is with us.”

In the same tea garden, I met a minor rape victim. Her mother is dead, and her father has remarried. The minor was raped multiple times by her stepmother’s brother. A woman community worker who is taking care of the minor says the case was tried under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act of 2012. The accused is in jail.

After several counselling sessions, the survivor is back in school. “She wants to continue her studies by staying in a hostel. We are waiting for the government to compensate her,” says the community worker.

These are not isolated incidents — as one travels from one tea garden to another, it becomes evident that the issues of trafficking, domestic violence, and rape, are present everywhere and official figures do not capture many of them.

In a tea garden, I watch women workers hunched over between rows and rows of tea bushes, their deft fingers plucking the tender leaves and buds and tossing them into the basket strapped behind their backs.

What strikes me is the silence. The workers hardly ever talk to each other — they are not allowed to speak, as conversation might slow down the quick movements of their hands. To me, that sight served as a metaphor for the lives of Assam’s tea garden workers — they work, and they suffer, in silence.

(Indiaspend.org is a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit)

(Image courtesy: Akarsh Simha via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic)