To design development projects to transform the lives of thousands of tea-pickers in
Sreemangal, Bangladesh, state and non-state actors must critically engage with local
ideas and culture.
Perhaps this morning too, you were energised by the stimulating effect of tea, the most widely
consumed drink around the world after water. The increasingly widespread aroma of this
beverage has become the favourite to people from the different corners of this planet for
hundreds of years.
How tea turned out to be one of the cheapest drinks in the global market from once a symbol of
upper-class luxury, no wonder carries an attestation of colonial oppression. Ethnic subdual in
labour recruitment with coercively low wages and slave-like division of the workload historically
contributed to achieving a high-profit margin in tea businesses, keeping prices competitive.
The fault in our ways of knowing the world often preclude us from adopting historical enquiry,
but the tea gardens carpeting the hills of Assam and Bengal have also stories long due to tell
and infuse the subaltern’s experience of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent into the global
knowledge production.
This op-ed will focus with a de-colonised sight particularly on the tea gardens of Sreemangal
which is often known as the tea capital of Bangladesh. It will shed light on how current
development efforts helping the marginalised tea workers to proceed towards better
understanding of their rights from a long continued voicelessness. From the peripheral sides of
history, they are building their new stories of resilience, slowly bringing them into the center.
Hidden ‘states’ inside the tea estates
The rigid socio-economic structure in the Indo-Bengal tea estates deliberately constructed by
the British managers and private producers using their unchallenged power and access to
labour weakened the local people’s agency and self-autonomy. Consequently, an inhumane
living and working condition became normalised for the surrounding areas of tea plantations
during the colonial era.
Figure: Enchanting greenery of tea gardens in Sreemangal/ Abdullah Safir
Systemic oppression and economic exploitation prevented local development and sustained an environment of control in the tea gardens obscure to the outside world. The damage was irreparable affecting the consciousness of those marginalised people living inside the tea gardens for generations.
The Human Bonsai
Similar to neighbouring Assam, the tea gardens in Sreemangal have every geographic feature to produce high-quality tea: the sloppy lands, temperate climate, humidity, and heavy rainfall. Tea produced from these gardens significantly contribute in ranking Bangladesh 10th among the tea producing countries in the world.
But, unfortunately, for most of the workers inside these gardens, ‘standard of living’ carries almost no meaning. An average regular tea picker earns 100 taka (barely $1.2) for a day and it decreases in off-season and again the irregular ones earn much less. The colonisers left long ago, even it has almost been fifty years that Bangladesh became independent, but these people are still living miserably while remaining powerless and exploited in the same way: just the actors being replaced, local elites are continuing the inheritance as the owners or managers of the gardens.
So, garden authorities have traditionally been reluctant to ensure the rights of tea pickers and the government has continued paying a little attention to these extremely hard-to-reach areas. The children of these tea garden workers’ are more vulnerable; they rarely receive education and minimum access to healthcare services.
No simile fits better than the tea plants for the lives of these tea pickers. Yes, our favourite drink comes from the plants that are not allowed to grow more than a few feet for the sake of better ‘production’, though they commercially live thirty to fifty years on an average. As the planters say, ‘pruning’ helps a plant to shape it up against itself by ‘controlling’ or ‘directing’ its growth.
Figure: The thwarted tea plants in typical gardens in Sreemangal / Abdullah Safir
‘Can the tea pickers speak?’
One of the most frequently quoted questions in contemporary critique in critical theory and cultural studies is ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’ This intriguing question was asked in the later eighties of the last century by Gayatri Spivak, an influential postcolonial intellectual.
The tea pickers are perfect examples of voice suppression. They will make you understand what Spivak meant when she said that the voice of the subaltern had been silenced by hegemonic historiography. Labeled as ‘underclasses’, they have been standing silent subjugated to their doubly privileged ‘manager babu’ for hundreds of years, failing to overcome the fear and speak a word, they still hesitate to negotiate for their basic rights even in this twenty-first century.
These people literally cannot speak as they have intentionally been made ‘othered’ in their society; every decision taken by the garden authorities have imposed a ‘voicelessness’ over the tea pickers.
Change starts with the basics
A study conducted by Human Development Research Centre (HDRC) and UNICEF Bangladesh confirms that overall multiple deprivation score of the tea gardens in Bangladesh is 0.541, which is 1.57 times higher than the composite national score. Higher degrees of deprivation (> 0.5) are evident in poverty, hygiene practice, nutrition, and education. However, it is highest in poverty (0.741) followed by hygiene practice (0.625).1 In order to transform human deprivation in to human development, it is imperative that we design development interventions starting with the basics, for example giving high priority on clean water, improved sanitation and hygiene.There are human settlements in the tea gardens hundreds of feet above the sea level requiring long motorbike rides to reach through the rocky and unsafe terrains. People from diverse ethnic identities including Hindustani, Santal, Uria, Bihari, Tamil, Ohmia, and Bangalee live here. Number of local, national and international NGOs have been working in the different tea gardens of Sreemangal now for improving the health and living standards of these people. Once it was extremely difficult for them to fetch clean water from the nearest spring by hour-long treks or miss out on a part of their daily wages for buying water, but now many of them have it just at the turn of a tap. While open defecation had been a normal practice, the situation nowadays has been steadily with access to improved toilets. After receiving sanitary instruments from the NGOs and being motivated by them, workers are now constructing toilets at their own cost.
Figure: Emerging rainwater harvesting systems on top of the hills in Nahar Garden (Sreemangal) / Abdullah Safir
In areas having terrains where neither shallow nor deep tube-wells were feasible options, innovative technological solutions like rainwater harvesting would be found nowadays. But overcoming the opposition of the managers and owners of the tea estates to make this change happen is still a challenge for the development entities. The willingness of the garden owners is still practically deciding the feasibility and nature of the projects, even the local government can hardly influence them, let alone the Panchayet members from the tea pickers’ community. Blocked access for NGOs inside the estates will still need a long time to open up completely without compliance pressure from the buyers.
Some of the remote schools inside the gardens now have inclusive WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) blocks ensuring separate toilets for boys and girls, safe drinking water facilities, handwashing points with soap, menstrual hygiene management facilities and accessibility features. Sustainability of these toilets have also been ensured by the received commitments from the School Management Committees with allotted O&M fund.
Figure: Girls of Satgaon High School (Sreemangal) drinking clean water in tiffin period/ Abdullah Safir
The children of the tea-pickers in many of the schools inside the gardens are now learning why and how proper sanitation and good hygiene behaviour can change their lives and they bring these messages back to home and practise with their family. “Now we have significantly low waterborne diseases, improved hygiene is necessary for us because it saves money”, says Khokon Gor, a beneficiary in tiprachara tea garden. These simple triumphs may sound poor in comparison with the 8% GDP growth story of rapidly urbanised Bangladesh, but the reality is that success indicators vary drastically for extremely unequal parts of an economy.
Good news is that the colonial injustices that the marginalized people inside the tea gardens have endured for so long is now slowly diminishing with gradual development. From a lower or colonized class status who have little access to their own means of expression, these people are losing dependence upon the language and methods of the ruling class of the tea gardens to express themselves and bringing significant changes for themselves.
Figure: Students’ of Horinchora School (Sreemangal) attending hygiene sessions/ Abdullah Safir
‘Times they are a-changin’’
Amartya Sen argued that human freedom is both the primary and the principal means of development. It is now evident that continuous effort to develop the condition of the tea pickers of Sreemangal has resulted in increasing the capacity of those marginalised people to claim their rights on their own.
Whether the service providers acknowledge or not, access to WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) has essentially been working as a tool for the ‘construction of voice’ for this community. The tube-wells here are not only some lifeless structures, but they are also working as physical exemplars of advocacy. It works slowly, but no doubt they help to create demand, increase the social status of the people and help them to raise voice against the garden management about the rights they deserve. Watering the seed of courage ensures nourished growth.
These one-ring toilets are also more than toilets; the ownership of these toilets have been transferred to the local communities and their operation and management deep route long-absent leadership among these communities. Predicting the transformational changes through the lenses of access to WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) facilities inside the remote tea gardens of Sreemangal will perhaps remind you that time may be changing somehow. Now they often pressurise the garden authorities together not only for tube-wells or toilets but also for other rights. Proven, any human being in this world can be an agent of change and insurgency. All they need is enabling environment.
Thinking for the ‘Pluriverse’
No doubt success is there but entrenched behavioral norms of the people has been one of the major challenges while working in the tea gardens as these communities have diverse indigenous traditions and practices which must be considered and addressed, otherwise sustainability of the development interventions may hamper. The small villages on top of the hills inside the tea gardens of Sreemangal have beautifully designed earthen houses. But, the service providers hardly considered the option of constructing toilets in the community’s practised way – despite of bricks and rods being so expensive in the local market. Same with the hygiene practice, NGOs discourage missing schools during periods, but the indigenous girls have traditionally remained isolated in a dark room during their menstruations. Service providers can afford one toilet for one household while the community people often ask for separate toilets, specially women refuse to share toilets with their fathers-in-laws. This resistance needs a deeper understanding of cultural and patriarchal discourse added to material structures of colonial exploitation and inequality in these societies. Without this analysis, so-called western behaviour change model may not sustain.
Figure: Typical earthen house of the tea pickers / Abdullah Safir
Transgenerational colonization has made it difficult to eradicate the internalized attitude of ethnic or cultural inferiority felt by the tea pickers. This op-ed, based on the author’s first hand experiences, limits its discussions within the success of access to WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) facilities as an operational concept, but suggests at the end, not to frame ideological domination through any kind of development interventions that will add on to the historical colonial experiences of these population.
We need to come up with culturally sensitive ways of providing services at the bottom, and think ‘glocally’ (global+local) while tailoring policies at the top. Our development solutions should be designed in a way to provide human agency, as noted development anthropologist Arturo Escober suggests. Government and Practitioners should, therefore, listen to the community people in terms of how they perceive and solve their problems.
1Assessment of the Situation of Children and Women in the Tea Gardens of Bangladesh, HDRC and Unicef, 2017
By Abdullah Safir