Silchar, May 28: The beleaguered tea industry in the Barak Valley region has appealed to the Tarun Gogoi government to review its minimum wage notification for tea workers issued on February 1 last year. In particular, the tea estates in the Barak Valley, comprising Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi districts, have spurned a recent Assam government move to usher in parity in the payment of daily-rated wages between tea workers in the Brahmaputra and Barak Valleys.
Both the Indian Tea Association (ITA) and the Tea Association of India (TAI) made this clear at a high-level discussion with the state government recently.
The meeting was convened by chief minister Tarun Gogoi in Guwahati in mid-April. The move to implement such parity in the wages for tea workers would spell doom for the tea estates in the Barak Valley, employing some 90,000 permanent workers and producing 55 million kg of processed CTC tea every year. The region has a total of 112 registered tea plantations.
The disparity in the payment of daily wages within the tea labour community in both the tea regions has been persisting for a long time.
At present, a permanent worker in any garden in the Brahmaputra Valley takes home a cash payment of Rs 48.50 everyday while his counterpart in the Barak Valley districts has to remain content with a daily wage of Rs 38.50.
What rankles the tea workers in the Barak Valley is that a projected hike of Rs 4 in their daily-rated wage since June last year has not been implemented yet.
This is because the planters are pleading for status quo after being plagued by a recession in the industry caused by the sharp fall in prices since 2001 and the steady spiral in the cost of inputs and wages.
The TAI’s Calcutta headquarters, which presented a three-page memorandum last month to Gogoi, had vigorously pleaded for the continuance of the wage differences between the workers of the two valleys. It argued that the tea industry in the Barak Valley is historically weaker economically than its counterpart in the cash-rich Brahmaputra Valley.
The note, a copy of which has been obtained by The Telegraph, revealed that at least two expert committees’ recommendations on the payment of minimum wages to tea workers in the state had endorsed different rates of payment of daily wages between tea labourers in the Brahmaputra and Barak Valleys.
The Chetia committee in 1951 had pegged such rates at Rs 1.2 for the Brahmaputra Valley tea workers and 15 annas for the Barak Valley labourers.
The H.N. Das panel in its recommendation in 1990 also firmly set the wage differentials between the two valley’s workers at Rs 17.60 and Rs 15.34 respectively.
Taking into account the disparity in the per kg yield of processed tea per hectare between these tea-growing valleys, the Assam government has so long been maintaining different rates of land revenue and leaf cess in both the valleys.
The TAI pointed out that not even a single garden in the Barak Valley would be able to pay the enhanced wages if parity is brought about in wages between the labourers at the valleys. The viability of the Barak gardens has been under threat in the wake of the steadily dwindling tea prices in the auctions and markets and the ever-spiralling costs of production, nearly 60 per cent of which comprise employment-related costs.